


Beautiful Oblivion

by stereonightss



Category: Naruto
Genre: AU, Cops, Crime AU, Crime Drama, Drug trafficking, Drugs, F/F, F/M, Family of Choice, Graffiti, Inner Sakura - Freeform, Inner Sakura as Outer Sakura, M/M, Modern Setting, Strong Language, Vandalism, akatsuki as the mob, graffiti writers, mafia, queer heroes, some gun violence, stupid sexy Itachi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-07
Updated: 2019-07-19
Packaged: 2020-06-24 07:49:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 10
Words: 33,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19719331
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stereonightss/pseuds/stereonightss
Summary: Streetwise vandal Naruto made a friend who promised to help him find his estrange graffiti partner, Sasuke. But what Itachi ropes him into may be more than he can handle.Crime drama AU. Complete!





	1. Run Your Pockets

**Author's Note:**

> _I alone am the one you don’t know you need, take heed, feed your ego_

Itachi smoothed his hair down in the rearview mirror. He checked his deep blue lipstick, turning his face side to side like a bird to get a full view in the dim yellow light of the parking lot. He looked cute, relatively understated in a low cut black muscle tank and tripp pants. His eyes were mostly bare—with lashes as long as his, he didn’t have to do much to emphasize them, just a swipe or two of mascara.

“You look fuckin crazy with that lipstick, man, believe it,” said the teen in the back seat.

Itachi shot the kid a withering look through the rear view, and was met with a sunny, shit-eating grin in reply.

“I suspect I am some kind of crazy, now that you mention it.”

“You think they’re really gonna let me in?”

Itachi turned around to look the boy over. He had black fishnet t-shirt that clung to his thick-built arms and torso, bright orange joggers with reflective stripes down the side, designer sneakers streaked with similar reflective material, and about half a chest of jewelry—spiked cuffs, chain bracelets, stacks and stacks of silver rings, two different chokers, and that ever-present, comically phallic crystal necklace. His hair fell in a rough shag to his prominent cheek bones, obscuring the topmost of his razor blade scars.

“Don’t worry, I know the bouncer.”

The scars, a punitive measure from a now defunct gang, aged the kid a little. Still, he didn’t quite look twenty-one. But he did look good, and at the club they were going to, that’s all that mattered.

“If I can’t even get in I’ll never get to talk to him.”

“I told you, it’s taken care of. You’ll see him, I promise.”

In the back seat, Naruto sighed. This was an insane plan. It was his kind of plan—jump into the chaos and make the best of it—but it prickled at his insides to think of all the ways it could go wrong.

“Run the scenario with me again?”

Itachi turned the radio down and tapped his black lacquered nails on the steering wheel. He pulled an oversized blue raspberry lollipop from the center console and twirled it in his fingers as he spoke.

“I’ll get you in, but once you’re in, you don’t know me. I have product to move so I don’t want to see you again until the end of the night. You’ll go to the bar and wait until you see a big man with red hair, you can’t miss him. He’ll be transferring the cash box in a crate of liquor. It’s on you to make yourself interesting to him. If he likes you, he’ll bring you upstairs.”

“Ok, all right. Big guy, red hair. I can do this.”

Itachi watched the kid lip the end of his crystal necklace, the nervous habit of a child.

“Are you sure you’re up for this? Orochimaru is—”

“Yeah, yeah, he’s a real bad guy. That’s exactly why I’m doing this, y’know.”

Itachi pursed his lips around the lollipop to hide the smile that threatened tobloom there.

“What makes you think he’ll even listen to you?”

Naruto’s eyes went distant and sad. He raked a hand through his messy blonde hair.

“I thought I told you, man. I knew him in high school. We were—we are crew, like this, y’know.”

Naruto twisted his first and middle fingers together and held them up for Itachi to see in the rearview.

“We hit all the best spots together. We could have gone all city. KURAMA and SUSANO. We were a good team.”

Itachi smiled around the sweet-tart taste of the lollipop, thinking of a few of the big productions the pair of graffiti writers had pulled off. There was a time when they were still minors with sealed records when Naruto and Sasuke were hitting every major neighborbood painting big, bold pieces—straights, throwies, hollows, big extinguisher tags twenty feet high, deathwish rollers in the most impossible spots, spots you could see from the highway and three different train lines. They hit spots everyone else called impossible, and they did it with style.

“You know he dropped that name. He writes HEBI now.”

“I know,” Naruto said, voice pitched low. “That ain’t him though. Not really. He’ll listen, I know he will.”

Itachi knew it was because they pushed each other that they got so far so fast. He could see it as he walked down the avenues: one would snipe a cutty little runner spot, and two blocks later, the other would chance something a little bolder in the same colors. That mutual push was sustained by a hunger only they had, the hunger of the lonely and the forgotten, two smart and bored and traumatized good for nothings with no one to watch over them and nothing to lose and everything to gain by trying.

“Naruto, he’s been running with Orochimaru’s crew for almost two years now. He’s in deep.”

Itachi, a writer himself, knew well that when you’re alone together with your partner against the world, against cops and junkies and busybody heroes and bulls and the cold of winter and the dark of night, when you’re alone together against your own fear—of climbing too high, of falling too far, of jail, of failure—slowly and inexorably you move toward having something.

“He’ll listen to me. If he doesn’t, I’ll knock his friggin lights out and drag him out by force.”

The thing you end up having, alone together, is each other. And no one hates to lose like the one who’s already lost, the one who’s already a loser.

“I have a feeling you’ll get close to what you’re looking for tonight,” Itachi said, tucking several carefully portioned baggies of designer party drugs into one of his many pockets.

Once you have that potent thing, that connection, you cling to it with the desperation of a drowning man.

“I never thought you’d help me. I mean, you’re a legend. UCHIHA, talking to me, helping me. No one back home in my neighborhood would believe it.”

“Believe it,” Itachi said blithely.

“A legend,” Naruto said dreamily, fixing Itachi with his wide blue eyes. “You remind me of him, y’know. A little. You’re so intense too, and like. Something in the eyes.”

“That’s racist,” Itachi said, smiling. “Just because we’re both Asian…”

“Oh god. That’s not what I mean. I just—”

“Relax, Naruto, I’m kidding. It’s time to go.”

It was even easier to get in than Itachi made it seem. They didn’t wait in line, they simply walked up to the entrance where a foppish looking punk with blonde bangs over one of his big blue eyes unhooked the velvet rope. A whispered word or two and daps for the big bouncer, a refrigerator of a man named Kisame, and Naruto was ushered in behind Itachi. No cover fee, no pat down, he didn’t even have to show his fake ID. Naruto felt like second degree royalty.

Hidden Sound was a lawless place, seedy without being grimy, built with enclaves and back rooms in scores. Then there was the legendary VIP zone upstairs, where rumors made it sound like something between a brothel and a halfway house for the troubled youths Orochimaru seemed to collect. Some said he pimped them, some said he just had them run dope and coke, some spun tall tales about illegal drug trials and Mengelesque experimentation. All Naruto knew was that he needed to get Sasuke away from all that, and fast.

The main floor of the club was a simple dance hall, clean and industrial and just a little bit severe. It was dark and loud and always crowded, even on weeknights. Tonight there was a DJ with white chin length hair and a snaggle tooth on stage, spinning something with bass so heavy that it made Naruto’s jewelry shake. There were dancers in cages hung from the ceiling, boys and girls and everything in between backlit by different shades of neon. Some of them danced with snakes, big albino bull pythons and yellow-eyed boas, others danced with fake swords and giant fans and whatever other bits of camp the eccentric owner dreamed up.

True to his word, Itachi disappeared into the crowd the moment they were inside, no doubt to find some quiet corner to sell from.

Naruto picked his way to the bar, where a fiery redhead in pink leather hot pants was mixing drinks with a sour look on her face. Naruto could see white cowboy boots when he peered over the bar. A turquoise and silver bolo tie bounced between her ample breasts as she shook martinis and margaritas and nearly threw them at her patrons.

“Blondie. What’ll it be?”

With the thick rimmed glasses and the undercut, the scowl was half way to cute. Naruto flashed her a brilliant smile.

“Um,” he said, surreptitiously counting the crumpled bills in his pocket. He glanced down at her (ample, very nearly exposed) chest, where a bright pink name tag said ‘HI MY NAME IS KARIN.’ 

“A Tecate please. Thank you, Karin.”

“Just a second.”

Karin made a quick round of the big semicircular bar before turning to her tumblers and jigs. She fished a hollowed out pineapple from the fridge and started to add bits of this and that to an extra large tumbler. Tequila, Cointreau, what may have been grenadine, some liquids from unlabeled squeeze bottles, a pinch of salt. What she strained out into the pineapple looked like Gatorade and smelled like a Starburst. It looked like it cost about thirty dollars.

It looked delicious.

Naruto waited patiently as she dropped a lime and three cherries and two different tiny umbrellas into the pink-orange drink, though, really, she could have just gotten him his beer first, since it takes two seconds to open a beer.

“Here,” Karin said, pushing the pineapple full of booze at Naruto.

“Uh. What?”

“From the piece of work in the corner.”

Naruto followed the jerk of Karin’s pointed chin toward a gorgeous blonde in a sequin purple crop top. A lime green scrunchie held her long blonde hair in a high ponytail. She made heated eye contact with him and held it as she slid her manicured hand into the pink hair of the girl beside her. Naruto turned away when they locked lips, open mouthed, tongues sliding blue and red in the neon lights.

“Thanks,” he said weakly, tossing a few wrinkled ones on the bar for Karin.

He scanned the room for the red haired man as he sipped at the (delicious) drink the girls sent down. From what Itachi said, it could be a few boring hours before the man showed.

“Damn, this is good,” Naruto said, to no one in particular.

At least he had this drink, the volume of four or five drinks, to hold him over. It tasted as good as it looked, better even. He popped a maraschino cherry in his mouth and made a little ‘mmm’ at the taste.

“What that mouth do,” slurred a voice in his ear.

He jumped, nearly choking on the syrupy drink.

“God, Sakura, you are so fucking drunk.”

“Shut up, Ino, he’s fucking hot.”

Naruto grinned. The girls looked like Beverly Hills Barbie 1987 with their vintage clothes and blue eyeshadow and big pastel hair. The pink haired one was a little plain, but she had a glint in her eye that made Naruto want to tell her dirty jokes till she pissed or cried or both. The tall blonde had ‘bitch’ written all over her, and he loved him a stone cold bitch too.

Maybe waiting wouldn’t be so boring after all.

“Thanks for the drink…you must be Paris Hilton.”

Ino, the blonde, smirked at him, but took his outstretched hand. He kissed her bony knuckles.

“And you’re Nicole right?”

Sakura, the pink haired one, looked him up and down and up again and licked her glossy lips.

“Dance with us,” she said in his ear.

It was the girls or the pineapple. Naruto took one long chug of the drink and set it back on the bar toward the service line.

“Let’s go.”

The girls each took an arm and dragged him out to the middle of the dance floor. If his mind wasn’t so focused on the mission, Naruto would have been on cloud nine. The lights, the music, the crowd, the hungry eyes on his body as he danced—he loved it, he thrived on it.

The girls ground up against him, Ino in front looking him square in the eye with her six inch heels, Sakura in the back, her small hands guiding his hips as they moved to the thumping dance beat.

“This is so much fun,” Sakura yelled over the music. “What’s your name?”

On a whim, Naruto shouted back, “Kurama!”

“Like the graffiti writer?” Ino said, winding her arms around his neck.

Naruto looked her over with a prickle of nauseous excitement. It took him a second to put it all together. Two girls about his age, maybe a little older, one a tall blonde—a duo.

“Are you,” he said into Ino’s ear, struggling to keep his voice private but audible. “There’s no fucking way, what are the odds.”

Naruto was up, up enough for a keen civilian to take note, but only another writer would instantly recognize his name like that. There was only one female duo on the east coast right now. If these two were it, Naruto had no business dancing with either of them. They were famous for scrapping, and fighting dirty when they did. There were too many stories of the shorter one breaking dudes’ faces in for talking just a hair out of line to the blonde.

“Are you COSMOS?”

“Are you a cop?” Ino said with a vicious grin.

He could feel Sakura press up against the firm curve of his ass, and Ino slid her knee between his thighs as if on cue. He was trapped, and the friction combined with an excited kind of fear was starting to make him hard.

“I’m Ino, and she’s Sakura. Say the other name again and I’ll cut your balls off,” Ino breathed in his ear. She leaned in, draping her chin over his shoulder. It took him a second to realize she was tongue-fucking Sakura’s mouth again. He slid his hand up her waist and gently pushed.

“C’mon, ladies, lemme out. I don’t wanna stand in the way of true love.”

They were laughing and stumbling as Naruto tried to extract himself. He almost made it all the way out from between them when a feeling hit him, a tingle up the back of his neck, the unmistakable sensation of being watched. He swept his eyes up to the balcony that surrounded the dance floor.

Sasuke.

Naruto felt his heart skip. All sound disappeared in the high hum of anxiety, everything around him fuzzed out of focus but that one dark pair of eyes in the pale face, haloed in blue by a spotlight. Naruto drank in the tilt of the mouth, the pinch of the eyes, the slight draw of the brow—shock, jealousy, anger, fear, and beneath it that cavernous wanting, like a sinkhole in the soul.

“Sas’ke,” Naruto whispered, frozen. By the minute widening of the dark eyes, Naruto knew Sasuke had read his lips.

The crowd on the dance floor was parting for a huge red-haired man with a case of booze hefted up onto his massive shoulder, and Naruto’s eyes flickered down for the barest moment. When he looked up again, Sasuke was gone.

“Sorry, ladies,” he said with a bow. “I really do have to go now.”

Naruto shouldered his way through the crowd to catch up to the man with the crate. He caught the end of a clipped conversation with the bartender as he slid up to the bar.

“—tipped off. It’s a good source. Get the inventory underground now.”

“Got it, Jugo.”

Naruto floundered. He inserted himself between Jugo and the nearest barfly and pasted on his sunniest grin.

“Hey, um, Karin was it? Can I actually have a beer please?”

“Just a second, blondie.”

Naruto watched Karin disappear behind the bar. He turned to Jugo.

“Hey there, big guy. Uh. Work out much?”

Jugo looked faintly confused.

“Cause, y’know. Obviously, you’re like super ripped. I mean you’re huge. You definitely work out. Right?”

“Who are you again?”

Naruto scratched at the back of his neck. He pulled up his crystal necklace and wound and unwound the cord around his fingers.

“I suck at this, sorry. You’re hot. Not my usual type, I mean, I like them kinda pretty and angry and you’re like, not that you’re not pretty, maybe more like handsome, and you seem really relaxed, y’know, not angry at all, even though you look like you could Hulk out at any moment and—”

“FREEZE. Lights UP. Everyone against the wall, NOW.”

Jugo, for all his size, slipped into the crowd and disappeared.

“Fuckkkkk me,” Naruto said, to no one in particular.

It was a raid. A squad of six cops in full riot gear poured in through the front, another team of four from the emergency exit at the rear. There was scuffling and shouting and the flood lights came on. Naruto sank to his knees, hands folded at the back of his head, and waited.

“You there, orange pants,” said a mild voice from behind. “Stand up. Hands where I can see them.”

Naruto slowly stood, slowly turned, slowly lifted his hands above his head.

The cop had a mask on his face, but the hair that stuck out the sides of his helmet was nearly white. He had a long scar bisecting his left eye, which was a shocking, icy blue, like the eye of a Siberian Husky, a stark contrast to the earthy gray of the right. It should have made him look mean, like some kind of cartoon villain, but mostly he looked bored. His gun was cocked but pointed harmlessly at the ground

“Walk with me. Come quietly and I won’t cuff you.”

“But I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“I said come quietly and I won’t cuff you,” the cop repeated, but his voice was all wrong. There was a note of cool steel in it this time that made Naruto want to obey.

“Okay, okay, yeesh, I’m coming.”

The cop walked Naruto out the front door.

“Fuck,” Naruto whispered. A young cop with thick black curls had Itachi bent over a squad car, one hand fisted in his long black hair, cuffing his arms roughly behind his back. Itachi made fleeting eye contact with Naruto and gave a little nod.

“Into the car,” said the grey-haired cop, opening the back door for him.

“Fuck this.”

The car door closed with a heavy thud. It sounded like a gavel, like a guillotine. Naruto had been running from the cops since he was eleven years old, and today, a week after his eighteenth birthday, a week after it started to really matter, they popped him for the first time. He always got away, always. Even on that night Sasuke dipped on him, leaving him with all their gear with the cops close behind and a helicopter overhead, even exhausted and alone, limping on a sprained ankle Naruto had managed to get away. But tonight, when all he was doing was dancing…

“I wasn’t even doing anything!” he said to no one in particular.

The gray haired cop slid into the front passenger seat of the squad car. The young cop opened the back door and shoved Itachi inside next to Naruto.

“Quick pit stop, ladies. Please bear with us,” the older cop said.

Naruto stared out the window and scowled. He put distance between himself and Itachi. If they booked Itachi for dealing and they knew Naruto was with him, he could be charged as accessory.

“I wasn’t even doing anything,” he grumbled.

This was bad. His late godfather had an old friend who was a lawyer, maybe he could call in a favor with the old lady.

“They didn’t Mirandize you,” Itachi said, tone incongruously light.

“That’s enough,” said the young cop.

“That’s enough,” Naruto said, pitching his voice low in imitation. “Yes, mister officer, whatever you say, I love a man in uniform,” he added in an exaggerated falsetto.

“Don’t we all,” Itachi said wistfully.

“Now, that’s really enough,” said the older cop with a sigh.

Piece by piece, he was shedding his riot gear as they drove. With the helmet off, Naruto could see through the rear-view he was younger than the white hair would imply, maybe thirty-five or thirty-six. Very sexy, strong jaw, beauty mark. And that scar, which somehow underlined the consonant harmony of his face. Too sexy to be a stupid cop.

“I’ll set us up when we get there, cap,” said the young cop.

“Thank you, Shisui.”

The young cop was pretty cute too, come to think of it. Naruto considered briefly trying to seduce his way out of this, but then he remembered the pitiful attempt with Jugo. He sighed, resigning himself to spending a night in bookings.

But the squad car didn’t seem to be headed toward the precinct.

“We takin a field trip?” Naruto said, craning his head to look out the window.

“Something like that,” Shisui said.

They pulled into a covered garage and parked in a darkened corner. Itachi yawned, rubbing at his cuffed wrists. Shisui looked back at him and grinned.

“You hungry, you maniac?”

“Thank god you asked. I am positively starved.”

“Hey, hey,” Naruto said, brightening at the idea of food. “I’m hungry too.”

“Shut up, punk. Cap?”

The older cop rubbed at his light stubble and sighed.

“Use my per diem,” he said. “But no Chinese. I’m sick of Chinese.”

“Copy that,” Shisui said as he ducked out of the car.

“Orange pants,” the older cop said, pinning Naruto with his dark eyes. “If I open the door, are you going to run away?”

Naruto pushed out his lower lip and jerked his chin up—defiance was an instinctive posture for him now. He wasn’t cuffed. There’s a slim chance he could get away. But Itachi’s level gaze took the fight out of him.

“I didn’t do anything wrong, so who gives a fuck. Book me, do whatever you want. I’ll get out. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Great,” the cop said, flashing a cheery smile. “Let’s go, boys.”

He opened the door to let Itachi out, then gestured for Naruto to follow. The old cop walked close behind, sandwiching Naruto between the bulk of his body and Itachi’s. He herded them through the garage to a door with a keycard lock. He reached around to swipe a card, opened the door, and ushered them into…what looked like a hotel room.

Shisui hung up the phone and quickly came to unlock Itachi’s handcuffs. He rubbed soothingly at the raw skin, eyes soft, borderline affectionate, then threw his arm around Itachi’s shoulders. The two disappeared into an adjacent room, chatting amicably in some clipped East Asian language as they went.

Naruto stared. He stared at the empty space they occupied for that bizarre display. He stared around at the bland gray and beige of the hotel room. He stared at the gray haired cop, just as blasé as their surroundings but for the intensity in his injured eye.

“What in the ever loving fuck is going on?”

The cop threw up his hand in a lazy greeting.

“Captain Kakashi Hatake of the NYPD. I head Vandal Squad. Nice to finally meet you, Naruto Uzumaki.”

“Oh, fuck,” Naruto said, swallowing. This was bad. Gray hair, gruesome face scar. The laid-back attitude threw him off but—he should have known. Kakashi was the most relentless captain Vandal Squad had ever had. He put away writers who had kept single names longer than Naruto had been alive.

“Have a seat,” Kakashi said, gesturing to the chairs set around a low coffee table.

There was a long stretch of time where something wordless passed between them. Kakashi made relaxed but extended eye contact with Naruto. It wasn’t a challenge, but it definitely wasn’t a fold. Naruto dumped himself into one of the beige armchairs and frowned.

”So?”

Kakashi pulled a worn paperback from a pocket of his tactical vest and began to read.

”Guess I’ll go fuck myself, then,” Naruto mumbled.

Kakashi read slowly, intently. He licked his index finger before turning each page. After the sixth page, Naruto cracked his knuckles and leaned forward, elbows on his knees.

”I dunno about you, but I am, like, extremely confused,” he said.

Kakashi lovingly dog-eared a page and turned his half-lidded eyes to Naruto, sweeping, like he was looking at a grocery store display and not an anxious, fidgety person.

“Run your pockets,” he said.

Naruto scowled.

“They teach you to talk like that at the academy?”

“Empty your pockets, or I’ll empty them for you.”

Naruto heaved himself up and shoved his jewelry-laden hands into the deep pockets of his orange track pants. He pulled out the contents and threw them down on the coffee table: two streaks in black and neon yellow, a wad of crumpled bills, some coins, a Metrocard, some mace, a bright orange mop, a jangling key ring with a little fox chain, a condom, a palmful of spray caps and two bright blue adapters.

Kakashi considered him for a moment before stepping over to drop himself on the opposite chair.

“Am I under arrest?”

Kakshi chuckled and sat back in the stiff chair, folding his long legs.

“No, you aren’t. Not yet.”

“Then why am I here?”

Itachi slipped back into the room with Shisui close behind. He must have showered, because his hair was damp. The lipstick was gone, and only a thin smudge of mascara remained under his eyes. He was wearing a loose sweatsuit with QUANTICO in big serif letters on the chest.

“Oh god. Oh my god,” Naruto said. “You, you set me up. You fucking played me.”

“I did, didn’t I,” Itachi said with a wry smile.

“You said you were UCHIHA. You talked like a writer! You looked me out for weeks!”

Shisui laughed openly.

“Naruto, calm down,” Itachi said.

“But I didn’t do anything tonight, so—”

“Naruto Uzumaki, age eighteen,” Kakashi began. “Alias KURAMA, alias KYUBI. Current member of the gang NBC, also known as—”

“Ninja Boi Crew,” Shisui said. “What are you, five?”

“Okay,” Naruto said, voice small and tight. “I get it.”

“Wait,” Kakashi said dryly. “I’m not done. Sixty-five storefronts, twelve condemned properties, fifteen industrial properties, four government buildings, and thirteen subway cars.”

“My lord,” Itachi said brightly. Shisui wolf whistled.

“And that’s just what we have photo documentation of within this city. We have two years of similar records from pieced together from law enforcement throughout Asia and Eastern Europe. I believe you were traveling with a family member?”

“As a minor,” Naruto mumbled. “Anyways, he’s dead now. It’s just me.”

“And you were attempting to make contact with Sasuke, alias HEBI, alias SUSANO.”

At this Naruto snapped his mouth shut. He stared at some point over Kakashi’s shoulder.

“I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

Itachi chuckled. The doorbell rang.

“I’ll get it,” Shisui said.

“Listen, kid, you’re in hot water,” Kakshi said, leaning over, elbows on his knees.

“This ain’t heat,” Naruto said. “I’ve been through way worse than jail in my life. Ya can’t cook me.”

“He never told you his government name, did he,” Itachi said. “Not even after all those years.”

Naruto grit his teeth. Sasuke kept everyone in his life, even Naruto (in some ways, especially Naruto) safely at arm’s length or farther.

“I don’t need someone’s government name to be their friend,” he said, scrubbing his hands over his face.

Shisui came back with two heavy paper bags of food. The three of them set to laying the food out on the coffee table. There was something sickeningly domestic about the whole thing, their heads bent as they doled the food onto paper plates, their motions oddly subdued, stark contrast to the gleam on the guns and tasers and mace and batons still strapped to Shisui and Kakashi’s hips.

“You were never curious?” Shisui said, handing out napkins.

“I don’t know how much you know about writers, but we kinda operate on don’t ask, don’t tell,” Naruto grumbled. Itachi answered that with a bright laugh.

“Don’t say that at Rikers,” Kakashi said dryly.

Naruto buried his head in his hands and sighed. This was bad. Jail, he could take. But he couldn’t let them get to Sasuke. Naruto had finally tracked him down after two years. He was so close now, so close. His skin was prickled with the memory of meeting those dark eyes through the smoke and bluster of the dancehall.

“It’s Uchiha,” Shisui said, holding a plate of food out to Naruto.

Naruto peeked out from between his fingers. His stomach twisted at the sight of the generous helping of pad thai and dumplings. He slowly leaned forward and accepted the plate.

“Whatdja say?” he said around a mouthful of dumpling.

“He said it’s Uchiha,” Itachi said. “Sasuke’s name.”

Naruto set his plate down and swallowed audibly.

“What?”

“I’m detective Shisui Uchiha of the joint Vice-Vandal temp squadron put together by that guy over there,” Shisui said, tipping his take out container toward Kakashi.

“And I put it together at the request of our esteemed colleague,” Kakashi said, nodding at Itachi.

“Special Agent Itachi Uchiha of the FBI’s Transnational Anti-Gang Taskforce.”

“Uchiha. You’re actually…you’re really…”

“Yes, I was.”

Naruto stared, mouth agape.

“But, but you’re a cop!”

Shisui laughed and threw his arm around Itachi’s shoulders.

“He’s the black sheep of the family, this one.”

“I was UCHIHA for seven years. I started young. Stopped when I was twenty.”

“You gotta be some kinda moron to write your actual name,” Naruto grumbled.

“He liked the challenge,” Kakashi said with no small amusement. “In the end, I never did manage to catch him. That he revealed himself to us later was a pleasant surprise.”

“After our family…after the incident, I stopped writing,” Itachi said. “There were psychiatrists, personality inventories, aptitude tests…my results piqued the interest of the director of forensic psychology with the FBI. They recruited me shortly thereafter.”

Naruto quietly ate, suppressing the shudder of fear at the realization that he had spent a good part of the past few weeks with an enigma like Itachi. Naruto considered his bullshit meter to be really strong. But Itachi, he must be some sort of genius at lying.

“So what, you’re a narc?”

“I’m a lot more than that,” Itachi said, elegantly lifting a dumpling to his mouth.

Suddenly, Naruto could see it, all the little details that should have alerted him to the danger the man radiated. The slim, elegant hands with the black lacquered nails were deceptively strong, tendons undulating in waves under the pale, smooth skin. The way he never got flustered, as though nothing surprised him. The corded muscle of Itachi’s forearms, though lean, boasted strength—even the slim line of his neck gave way to broad, lean-muscled shoulders. It wasn’t the frail physique of a party boy who subsisted on E and candy and vodka cranberries. It was the lean, coordinated musculature of a fighter, disciplined and full of deadly grace.

“Why are you telling me all this? Isn’t that really really dumb? I could blow your cover.”

Itachi cocked his head like a bird, and Naruto got the distinct impression he was being seen through. He realized then that Itachi’s blank, thick-lashed eyes were killer’s eyes. It chilled him so deep he put his food down.

“I don’t think you will, though.”

“Especially now that you know what we have on you,” Kakashi chirped with a lazy smile. They had to be the weirdest bunch of cops Naruto had ever seen.

“I lead a task force whose aim is to take down an international crime ring called Akatsuki, of which Orochimaru is a known member,” Itachi said.

“I don’t know nothin about any of that,” Naruto said.

“But you do know Sasuke.”

Naruto grit his teeth.

“Don’t think I’m gonna snitch just because you got me. You got me, that’s all. I ain’t no snitch, believe it.”

“I do believe that,” Itachi said gently. “In the time we spent together, I was touched by your decency and loyalty. You’re a good kid, Naruto. I really feel that if anyone can save my little brother from the insanity he’s gotten himself into, it’s you.”

Naruto’s eyes went wide. He scanned Itachi’s face, the gentle slope of the high cheekbones to the strong jaw, the small mouth that only smiled from the left corner, the piercing almond eyes projecting a wild strength and a deep, penetrating intellect. He considered the rich voice, the broad shoulders, the narrow set of the hips, even the shape of the pale hands. Shades of Sasuke all over.

“He said his family, his whole family…he said his brother was dead.”

Itachi sat back, face drawn. There was a deeply buried anguish there that aged him terribly in that moment.

“To him, I am. I’m quite certain he hates me, and with good reason.”

Kakashi leaned forward, fixing Naruto with his intense bicolored stare.

“Itachi has been undercover for a number of years. He’s managed to infiltrate Orochimaru’s milieu. But Orochimaru doesn’t trust him entirely.”

“He sees me as a threat,” Itachi said.

“Sasuke, however, Orochimaru sees as malleable, impressionable. He’s let the boy closer to his core operations than any of our agents have ever managed to get.”

Orochimaru had a reputation for grooming impressionable young people, treating them with drugs and special privileges in his many clubs, stroking their egos and gaining their trust, gradually weaving them deeper and deeper into his ranks. They would be discarded like trash any time a bust happened. There was never any substantial evidence tying Orochimaru to the supply chain, though the FBI had been after him for years. If anyone snitched, one way or another Orochimaru would do them himself. Sacrificial pawns.

And then there was the rumor that he kept particular kids around for even less savory reasons. Naruto growled, balling his fists.

“He’s gotta get outta there.”

“Agreed,” Shisui said, handing Naruto a can of soda. “Sasuke isn’t just a point of information for us. He’s family.”

“I’ve done all I can to protect him,” Itachi said. “It’s time I entrusted him to someone else.”

“Someone like me, huh,” Naruto said, eyes distant.

“Of course,” Kakashi said, “if you fail to cooperate, we can always bury you with your substantial record. Minor or not, you’re looking at punitive damages in the hundreds of thousands.”

“On the other hand,” Shisui said. “If you do cooperate, we wipe your record. Total immunity.”

Naruto leaned his head back and sighed. He stared up at the mottled textures of the drop ceiling tiles, willing them to give him some sort of sign. If only Jiraiya were still alive…

“I ain’t a snitch.”

“We’re not asking you to snitch,” Shisui said. “We’re asking you to go UC and execute a recovery mission. All the information we need, we’ll get from Sasuke when he’s back on our side.”

The face that loomed from the balcony of the dancehall that night was a tight, unsmiling thing. Sad and somehow resigned. The eyes were cold and dead. It was a bad look.

Naruto thought back to the first night they pulled off a clean train, the rush and the total adrenaline high, feeling like they could read each others’ minds as they picked their way past security to do the panels that landed them on front page news. How they fell back on the floor of Sasuke’s room, grinning and trembling with the realization that they pulled it off, too happy and too raw to even care that they were leaning into one another for balance, foreheads touching as they laughed themselves calm again. He remembered Sasuke’s smile, the only full unguarded smile he ever saw, so wide it crinkled those piercing dark eyes. He just wanted to see that smile again.

Naruto sat up straight.

“I’ll do it,” he said. “On one condition.”

Kakashi cleared his throat.

“You’re not really in a position to negotiate,” he said.

“I won’t do it unless you wipe Sasuke’s record too. I gotta get him out, but like, I’m not gonna help you rescue him just so you can throw him right in jail. Fuck that.”

The three men opposite him looked to each other, faces blank.

“We don’t know the full extent of what he’s done,” Kakashi said.

“We know him, cap. He wouldn’t do anything nuts unless he was under extreme duress,” Shisui said.

“I have to admit, I’m fond of this condition,” Itachi added with a nod.

“Great. Good. I’ll do a good job. I’ll do a great job.”

“This is a serious assignment,” Kakashi said. “You’ll become a contracted undercover agent. There are procedures, protocols, training. If you’re not up for it, if you fail, you could end up dead.”

Naruto cracked his knuckles.

“Sasuke’s been in this for two years, all alone with all those creeps. If he can handle it, so can I. What kinda friend am I if I can’t even help him when I get a chance like this.”

“You’re sure?” Itachi said, and for the first time, Naruto read distress on his face, a tightly wrapped desperation.

“I’m gonna get him back, you better fuckin believe it. Now tell me, what do I have to do?”

Kakashi stood, looking Naruto up and down with a lazy smile.

“I’ll be your handler from now on. Get a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow, we start training.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was super inspired by the daily updates on KinomiAkai’s Something Good, so I decided to try the same thing with my first Naruto fic.
> 
> Thanks for reading!! I really hope you liked it. This world is something I know a little bit about, so it was always fun for me to imagine my favorite characters in these kinds of situations. If anyone is interested in an index of graffiti terms, I can add that at the end.
> 
> I just got back into this fandom after abandoning it when I was a kid and it’s been SO GOOD. I am just floored by all the amazing pieces and writers (blackkat and rageprufrock and thehoyden and kinomiakai and askerian and weialala and so many others) and community so damn, good job everyone. 
> 
> Thanks again for reading and see you tomorrow!


	2. Little Caesar

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A guest from out west - and an itch that’s hard to scratch.

_Two Months Later_

Shikamaru melted down into the couch in the Aburames’ basement. A haze of smoke hung in the air, cast in gold and orange by the lava lamps and Christmas lights. He pulled the hood of his sweatshirt up over his ponytail and willed himself warmer.

“I swear, this little Korean girl, she looked like a total fucking nerd, man. Little mousy bookworm or some shit with weird eyes,” Kiba said from his place sprawled out on the multicolored braided rug. “But she was a capital F freak. F-R-E-A-K. Big titties too.”

“She gonna speak to you ever again after seeing that tiny dick of yours?” Shikamaru said, folding his arms behind his head.

“Shut the fuck up. At least I got it in. Not like you ever do. And yes, I’m taking her out again this weekend, fuck you very much. To the boardwalk. It’s closed, but like, just to walk around. She loves my dog, wants to go to a dog-friendly place.”

“Sounds like a real pain in the ass,” Shikamaru said with a shrug.

Kiba’s cocker spaniel perked up, wagging his nub of a tail and whining.

“Hey losers,” Naruto said as he trudged down the stairs. He flopped down on the couch next to Shikamaru and let out a long sigh.

“I’m fuckin bushed,” he said. He patted his stomach, and Akamaru jumped up and settled in his lap.

“I don’t know why you’re working so hard,” Shikamaru said. “Whatever this new secret job is, it can’t possibly be worth the trouble.”

Naruto got quiet. Naruto was never quiet. Shikamaru sat up just a fraction to look at him.

“It’s all good,” Naruto finally said, stroking Akamaru’s head. “It’s all gonna be worth it in the end. Right boy?”

Shino stepped out of the back room, a pile of blankets in his arms.

“Naruto. Good to see you.”

“Hi Shino.”

“Listen, we’re gonna have company tonight,” he said. “Some crusties from out west, they’re passing through on the way to Canada. They’re taking a temp assignment with the serve. I told them they could crash for a while while they do.”

“Who?” Naruto said, absently stroking Akamaru.

“Couple of nobodies. Freight kids, you wouldn’t recognize the older two.”

“I might,” Naruto said.

“Really, moron?” Kiba said from the ground. “You’re one of the most ignorant writers I know. You know shit about fuck unless it’s in your own neighborhood. It’s like you live in a bubble of your own bullshit.”

“Thanks for the hot take, asshole. Sorry I’m not on my phone all day like you.”

“The young one is a big deal though,” Shino said. “Writes SHUKAKU.”

“ _The_ SHUKAKU?” Shikamaru said with a sliver of interest. “Whole car SHUKAKU?”

“That’s the one,” Shino said.

“They say he has a thousand panels,” Kiba said.

“They’re wrong,” Shikamaru said. “He’s got more than that.”

“Insane,” Naruto said.

“Shino, baby,” Shino’s older sister called down the stairs. “There’s somebody here for you.”

“Best behavior, please,” Shino said as he disappeared upstairs.

Naruto chewed his lip as he absently stroked Akamaru’s belly. He laid his head back on the couch and stared up at the ceiling.

Shikamaru found his pregnant quiet even more annoying than the free-associative word salad of his incessant chatter. Something had to be done.

“You’re doing it again,” he grumbled.

“What am I doing?”

Shikamaru heaved a bored sigh.

“Pining.”

Naruto kept his eyes on the ceiling.

“I’m not pining. I was just—”

“You’re pining.”

Naruto rolled his head to look at Shikamaru through his dark eyelashes.

“Okay. I saw a flick of this piece he did. He’s still at it.”

Shikamaru sighed.

“It was good, is all. Y’know?”

“It’s been over two years, Naruto. Find another partner, go fuck it out with someone, get a different hobby. Do something. This emo thing is real lame.”

“He never took another partner,” Naruto mumbled. “Why should I?”

“No one else can put up with that guy but you.”

“Shika, c’mon,” Naruto said weakly.

“Anything’s better than crying over some dirtbag traitor who doesn’t give a shit about his friends,” Kiba said from the floor. “He dipped on you. Dipped right out of your life. He’s probably whoring around for that kiddyfucker now and selling drugs to twelve year olds. Get over it, moron.”

Naruto’s hands stilled on Akamaru’s back.

“Don’t fucking talk about him like that. You didn’t even know him,” he said, though it came out quiet and weak even to his own ears.

Shikamaru shot Kiba a look. They all hated Sasuke for what the guy did to Naruto, but shitting on him only ever seemed to make Naruto feel worse.

“Fine, stay sad forever. It’s your life.”

Naruto was about to say ‘I will,’ but—he wasn’t strictly sad. He wasn’t strictly unhappy. Especially not now that he had a mission, a goal, even if that goal was to get to Sasuke.

Akamaru perked his head up from Naruto’s lap. There was the sound of the back door closing, and shortly after the muted drumroll of four sets of feet on the basement stairs.

“—and you’re welcome to stay as long as you like. That’s Naruto,” Shino said, nodding toward the couch, “and Shikamaru, he takes flicks, and that guy down there is Kiba. Guys, this is Gaara, and that’s Kankuro, and Temari.”

“Sup,” Kiba said.

Naruto looked the trio up and down from the corner of his eye. Kakashi’s training was seeping slowly into his brain, changing all his habits, reorienting his thoughts. He noticed clothes, posture, inflection, micro expressions. He catalogued tells and filed information in the back of his mind for comparison and confirmation later. He drank in data from the world around him, sharp now, sharper even than at the height of his runs in and out of the guarded transit yard to paint the laid up train cars.

The taller one, Kankuro, was a classic punk, ripped black clothes and paint splattered Docs, leather jacket and earrings and eye makeup and messy spikes of travel-greasy hair. The girl Temari was much the same, fishnet on fishnet, platform combat boots, crop shirt with the neck cut so wide it exposed her angular shoulders, which were covered in scratchy black tattoos of flowers and rats and devils and knives and snippets of lyrics in messy writing. Temari had a butterfly knife tucked into the waistband of her cutoff shorts, and Kankuro wore for a belt a chain so thick that it definitely doubled as a weapon. They looked hungry, almost feral, but there was something earnest in their faces that put Naruto at ease.

And then there was Gaara.

He was compact, a few inches shorter than Naruto’s own 5’10”, but he radiated vicious strength. He wore loose desert camo joggers tucked into construction boots and a plain white thermal pulled down over his hands with holes where his thumbs poked through. He had black nail polish, a thick layer of coal dust and oil in dark crescents under his nails where the polish had chipped away. There were tattoos across his knuckles that read AMOR and ODIO in thick script. A single earring, a buckskin fannypack, a wallet chain—no weapon. Of the three, he had the most understated dress. But of the three, only Gaara set off Naruto’s inner warning bells.

“You’re SHUKAKU,” Naruto said, meeting Gaara’s steady gaze.

Maybe it was the shaved eyebrows or the heavy eyeliner or the kanji face tattoo, all of which drew attention to the piercing green eyes, deep and blank like an animal’s eyes, a predator’s eyes, but Naruto felt a chilly thrill slip down his spine at the sight of him.

“You’re KURAMA,” Gaara said, voice flat. “What of it?”

Pain and insight and suspicion and need all swirled in the sea-green eyes. Naruto’s heart skipped.

“Don’t start a pissing contest with our fucking hosts, Gaara,” Temari said. “Go cool out with a smoke or something before you lose your shit.”

Gaara’s hands curled into fists, but he stood steady, glaring at Temari. She looked away after a moment, chewing her lip. He shot Naruto a brief, considering look, then stalked upstairs.

Naruto stared after him a long time, something itching in the back of his mind.

“Sorry bout him,” Kankuro said.“We’ve been traveling for days. We’re all wound a little tight.”

“It’s all good,” Shino said. “Me and the guys will go grab some food. Make yourselves at home. Come on, Kiba, Shika.”

“What a fucking pain,” Shikamaru mumbled, pushing himself up and off the couch.

Naruto moved to follow, but Temari grabbed him by the shoulder.

“Here,” she said, pressing two cigarettes into his hand. “If there’s a roof in climbing distance, I guarantee he’s on it.”

“There is,” Naruto said, tucking a cig behind each ear. “Thanks.”

He jogged up the stairs and out into the backyard of the old brownstone, where the ladder to the fire escape was in easy reach from the top of the fence. Naruto climbed the fence with practiced ease, then hefted himself quietly up the fire escape.

Gaara was standing on the roof, looking out over the south side of the borough toward the sea. The bridge to the suburbs rose up from the inlet, already jeweled with the white and red lights of rush hour traffic.

“It smells like the ocean here when it doesn’t smell like piss,” Gaara said, his back turned to Naruto.

“Well, there’s the ocean, y’know. And I don’t need to tell you where the piss comes from.”

Naruto walked up to stand beside him. He offered one of Temari’s cigarettes.

“Smoking is filthy,” Gaara said, tucking the filter in the corner of his mouth.

“But it sure feels good,” Naruto said, reaching out to light it for him.

They puffed quietly and watched the lights on the highway thicken.

“I’m filthy myself,” Gaara said, exhaling smooth and long. “It took us three days to ride out from Richmond.”

“Shino’ll let you shower, for sure. And like, you can always come to my place. It’s a dump, but it’s close, and the hot water works.”

“Hm,” Gaara said. “Thanks.”

The guy had a short fuse, but there was something under it, something decent and hurting, calling out for—what, Naruto didn’t know. Maybe something they both needed. Maybe something Naruto already had. He took a long, long drag and sighed it out slowly, felt some of the tension in his shoulders roll away with the smoke.

“I saw HEBI in Philly,” Gaara said. “He asked if I knew you.”

Naruto winced.

“S’he all right?”

Gaara seemed to turn the question over before answering.

“Are any of us?”

They tossed the spent butts over the edge of the roof and stared. When Naruto made no move toward the fire escape, Gaara pulled two more cigarettes from a case in the cargo pocket of his pants.

“Third Friday from now,” he said, lighting Naruto’s cigarette. “They’re moving product at the port. I’m the lead pickup for the serve, but you could go in Kankuro’s place. If you wanted to.”

“If I wanted to.”

Naruto gazed at the shorter boy from the corner of his eye. With his quiet ruthlessness and squared shoulders, he looked like a caesar looming over the razed expanse of Bay Ridge, ready to conquer the territories below.

“He’ll be there,” Gaara said. “He’s my point of contact.”

“Guess I’ll be there too, then.”

Naruto watched the ember wind down toward the filter, leaving a column of brittle ash. The silence they stood in as the sun dipped low was a comfortable one. Steeped in the stillness and the quiet, Naruto felt himself getting old. Old and cold and dry and compartmentalized, heartless like a cop, body hard and aching from the brutal regimen Shisui had him on, brain a motley soup of facts and figures and tactics.

“There’a a spot up on Fulton I saw from the J where it runs above ground,” Gaara said, crossing his arms, a young Napoleon in coal-dusted Timbs. There was something thrilling about the high cant of his chin, how he looked down his nose at the streets below. He moved as though he bore a mantle, a heavy arrogance laid over crushing insecurity, packed down tight like cotton over gunpowder and ready to explode at the tiniest spark.

“I know the one. You’ll need a lookout.”

The rage and the pain that rolled off him in waves hit Naruto like a gut shot. Gaara turned his caged animal eyes to Naruto, and Naruto could feel himself crumbling.

“It’s a big spot. Big enough for two.”

He felt a familiar thrill hum low in his belly. It had been so long since the last little fire burned there that he almost mistook it for the belated rush of a nicotine high. He smiled, and the smile broke the scars on his cheeks at odd angles.

“It’s a date, then.”

*

Sasuke slammed the door of his apartment

“I’m home,” he said to the empty dark.

He hit the hall light switch with his fist as he toed his shoes off in the entryway. It was late, after midnight. Orochimaru had kept him long hours running logistics for the next shipment. Sasuke was tired and cranky and hungry, but most of all, he had the itch.

It had slipped to the back of his mind for a time, during the early months when he was pouring himself into ascending the ranks. Every step forward as Orochimaru’s hand brought him that much closer to Itachi. But the itch had returned, first as a tickle, then a dull ache, building until Sasuke wanted to crawl right out of his skin with it.

Like any chronic sickness, the itch came in waves, cycles of indeterminate length, though there were certain triggers: a sure one was the tightening press of the civilian world when his work took him to regular places at regular hours, where respectable people squinted and sneered at his nose ring, his long hair, his loud clothes, his shoulder tattoo. Any mention of his family, of his long estranged brother, reliably sent him into a depressive rage from which only scratching the itch till he was raw all over withdrew him. And always, infuriatingly, Naruto.

The itch became a burning in his chest, pinched and throbbing, cresting as he changed into his mission clothes, trading stylish streetwear for paint-flecked black: disposable clothes, clothes for rolling under gaps in fences, for scrambling over chaff-dusted rail cars, for barbed wire snags and the fear-tang of sweat and drops of paint over everything, shoes powdered with overspray and scuffed from a hundred scrambling climbs up brick and chain-link and iron grate.

He thought of Naruto most in the preparation, the outfitting and the packing, the big cat prowl around the spot. Naruto’s easy confidence, infectious, turning the pre-mission clench to something slippery and warm like a shot of liquor and just as intoxicating. The dance of the blue eyes and the cajoling and the teasing and the smell of him as they changed, the brush of his overwarm body as they picked through their paint for colors, arguing about trivial things. Naruto made the fear sexy, he made scratching the itch feel like sinking down into warm water, into sheets, into embracing arms, or so Sasuke imagined.

Packing alone, he felt dry, distant even from himself. But then the focus descended, and his senses ratcheted up, and he became an animal, seeing tasting smelling hearing, and then, at last, he was ready.

He rode to the spot on his bike. Climbed a fence, dropped himself down into the lot. No look-out, because he could only ever stand to work solo anymore. Anything else felt wrong, shamefully exhibitionist.

He kept loose and ears and eyes open, but he could feel in the air that the night was a blessing. Sometimes the air carried warning, and on those nights something always went wrong. But tonight, the flow came easy and it was dancing, it was swordplay, it was a plunge into cool clean water and four letters H - E - B - I. It was good. He was good, and the itch was gone.

And he walked his bike back home slow and he was momentary royalty and he caught tags and slapped stickers and he was immortal and he rounded the corner two blocks from his apartment and stop. There was a new piece, two-letters, two of them, on a rolldown—teasing, as though done on purpose. But that was impossible, because he made sure none of his old friends knew where he lived now. Still, it felt personal: KU and SK, and he knew who they were because one he knew best (only an idiot outlines orange in lime green), and the other had been popping up around the city the past few weeks, loud and risky and impossible to ignore.

Sasuke checked the cans in his bag. Not a lot, but enough for a few throw ups. It was after three AM and he had another good hour or two of dark. The itch creeped up like it had never been gone. He got on his bike and turned around.


	3. Heart of Glass

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What's up, doc?

Iruka shifted the overstuffed files underneath a white cardboard bakery box and balanced the stack in the crook of his hip. He fished for his keycard in the pocket of his slacks and cursed Kakashi’s paranoia. Security procedures at the unmarked government training facilities were cumbersome, but regrettably necessary, especially in this case. If anyone in the know saw the highly decorated, highly recognizable captain of Vandal Squad sparring with a similarly recognizable blonde-haired graffiti punk, all their efforts would go straight down the drain.

Iruka was pleased to find Kakashi lounging with a cup of coffee at table near the mat area in the underground gym. The man had been driving himself and his whole team too hard these past few weeks.

“Yo,” Kakashi said, lifting his cup in greeting.

“Brought donuts,” Iruka said, dropping the files and the box onto the table. He took off his suit jacket and carefully laid it on the back of a folding chair.

“I knew there was a reason I liked you,” Kakashi said dryly.

Over on the mats, Shisui, a once-rising MMA fighter, was putting Naruto through the paces. The bulk of Shisui’s body moved with surprising speed and the syrupy grace of a tiger. Naruto by contrast was a hurricane of knees and elbows, built strong and thick like Shisui but lacking the finesse to really maximize it. Still, he had the animal ferocity of a latchkey kid, a neighborhood kid, a scrappiness that couldn’t be taught. It gave him the advantage of unpredictability.

“The kid’s good,” Iruka said, rubbing at the scar that ran over the bridge of his nose. He got the scar in the army, when he was a medic. Touching it was a sort of nervous tic, a tell that he was either chuffed or nervous. Sometimes both. He watched for a moment, rapt, as the two wove around each other like wolverines, trading swipes and blows and kicks with muted, husky grunts.

“He’s getting there,” Kakashi said.

“He’s getting around,” Iruka said, flicking the topmost folder open.

These were the most recent additions to Naruto’s bloated case file, a collection of photos: bold, full-color pieces in very loud, very risky spots. KURAMA / SHUKAKU in complementary colors ran over storefront rolldown gates, along underpasses, across train bridges, blazing over rooftops and one tall water tower. Some of them even had characters, cartoon foxes and raccoons in orange jumpsuits or cat burglar black, making lewd gestures with their clawed fingers.

Kakashi filed away the photos and smiled his opaque, cheery smile.

“The one thing that kid’s got real aptitude for is annoying me,” he said. “I think he does it on purpose.”

“Well, you did say he had to maintain his identity,” Iruka said, gentling the bakery box open with a pen knife. “It’s great cover. No one would think someone that active is a plant.”

“It’s the principle,” Kakashi said, grabbing a glazed donut to dunk in his coffee. “He thinks he has the keys to the city now that he’s got blanket immunity.”

“It’s good for him,” Iruka said with a smile. “His mood’s been on the up since he made a new friend.”

“But the principle—”

“You’re asking a lot of him. You could at least cut him some slack about this.”

“Woah, kid, easy there,” Shisui said from his place sprawled out on the mats. “I tapped.”

Naruto panted, blue eyes wild, as he slowly let Shisui out of the textbook shoulder lock he’d managed to pin the older man with. He flashed a sunny grin.

“I can’t believe I finally got you,” he said as he helped Shisui to his feet. “Took fuckin long enough.”

“Talk to me again when you can pin the cap, usuratonkachi,” Shisui said, ruffling Naruto’s sweaty hair.

“What the fuck did you just call me?” Naruto said, knocking Shisui’s arm away.

“Oh, you didn’t know?” Shisui said with a smile. He hooked his arm around Naruto’s neck and jerked the boy close in a half-hug, half-hold. “That was your nickname in the Uchiha house. When lil cuz came to live with me, he talked about you constantly. I thought to myself, what a name, when am I gonna meet this guy?”

“What does it mean?”

“Oh, it means you’re sharp as a marble and about as useful as a glass hammer. As dumb as your hair would imply. Maybe dumber.”

“That arrogant piece of shit,” Naruto mumbled. Shisui laughed and let him go.

“When I razzed him for giving you a pet name, he got all red and said he’d stop. Said he didn’t even have to diss you, because you diss yourself.”

“Well I’m gonna diss him in his own language the next time I see his smug ass. Teach me how to say cocksucking sonofabitch, c’mon.”

“That’s enough,” Kakashi said, beckoning them up with a wave of his hand. “Eval time.”

Naruto trotted up to the table and took the bottle of Gatorade Kakashi offered him.

“Ugh. Donuts again? So the cartoons are right when—”

“Say it and I’ll knock your block off,” Shisui said.

“Here,” Iruka said, pulling a small paper bag from the back of the box and tossing it at Naruto. “I went to Ferrara’s just for you.”

Naruto caught the bag mid air and peered inside: two overstuffed cannolis and so much powdered sugar that it puffed out of the bag in a fine cloud when Naruto sniffed.

“You’re the fuckin best, doc. You’re my favorite. I think I love you, actually,” he said. “I’ve never known a love this pure.”

“And how does that make you feel?” Iruka said, sliding out his note pad.

“Very funny, doc,” Naruto said around a mouthful of cannoli. “I feel like shit. Shisui kicked my ass five times already.”

Iruka smothered a laugh. It wasn’t exactly appropriate, the deep affection he felt for this kid. As a psychiatrist and social worker, he had to walk the line between compassion and professionalism. But there was something so irresistible about Naruto, something so vibrant and friendly and wounded and strong that Iruka, despite himself, couldn’t help but love the kid as his own.

“Be serious,” Kakashi said, handing Shisui a towel. “I need a full eval before we can clear you for tonight’s mission.”

“This is our best chance to separate Sasuke from Orochimaru,” Shisui said, sitting down at the table. “Vice is in charge of the raid, they’ll seize the shipment. Kakashi and I will grab you and Sasuke. You’ll have your chance to talk to him in the holding cell.”

“But you’ll let my friend go right? It’s only cause of him I even get to be there tonight.”

“We’ll do what we can,” Shisui said. “I can’t promise you that, but I will try.”

“I need to know you’re focused on your objective,” Kakashi said. “We need Sasuke to feel sympathy for you. It needs to look real.”

“I think I’ve had enough practice getting my ass kicked by you guys to sell it, y’know,” Naruto grumbled.

“Everything you think you know goes out the window in a real fight or flight situation,” Iruka said. “And I get the sense that emotions will be heightened. You haven’t seen your former partner in a few years, correct?”

“Yeah,” Naruto said, slumping down in his chair. “Something like that.”

“And you really think you’re ready for this?” Kakashi said.

Naruto leveled him with a glare. Kakashi read no bluster in his eyes, only a steely determination over an ocean-blue, ocean-deep focus.

“I’m ready, believe it. I do my best work under pressure.”

“Let’s hope so,” Iruka said.“You’ve been putting yourself under some additional pressure these days, haven’t you, Naruto?”

Naruto mopped his neck with a towel and shot Iruka a suspicious look.

“Meaning?”

Iruka sifted through the photos in the file on the table. He pulled out his favorites, rare photos of Naruto in action. The series of photos, taken from security footage at a deli near one of Naruto’s pieces, showed two black clad figures in snapbacks and respirators crouching behind a dumpster. It followed their fast progress as they helped each other climb up the side of the building and away, out of range of the camera.

“It’s an impressive show of cooperation, this one,” Iruka said, picking up a photo that showed Naruto standing wide-legged on top of the dumpster, two backpacks slung over his right arm, reaching up with his left hand to brace Gaara’s thigh.Gaara stood on Naruto’s shoulders, stretching to grab the lip of some scaffolding.

“You could’ve joined the circus,” Shisui said.

Naruto smiled, blue and wistful, at the picture.

“Maybe we will when this is all done,” he said, making careful eye contact with Kakashi.

“SHUKAKU isn’t in my sights,” Kakashi said, reading the tension in Naruto’s jaw. “As long as he stays transient, he’s Albuquerque’s problem.”

“Woof, that’s a relief,” Naruto said, running a hand through his hair.

“But try and reign it in, will you? The more attention you draw to yourselves, the more likely we are to be pressured by the commissioner to crack you. And if the rail companies request our cooperation in their case against him, there’s only so long I can delay the information.”

Naruto rolled the Gatorade bottle back and forth on the table and pursed his lips.

“I get it. I hear ya. Sorry, boss. I just—”

“You’re enjoying yourself,” Iruka said.

Naruto looked away, eyes unfocused. He frowned.

“I guess I am, huh.”

“Isn’t that supposed to be a good thing?” Shisui said. Naruto bit his lip and stared at a spot on the wall.

“No, yeah. I dunno.”

“Christ, kid,” Shisui said. “I love my little cousin to the moon and back, I really do. But still, I can’t wrap my head around how he got so deep under your skin. He doesn’t own you. You know that, right?”

Iruka laid a hand on Naruto’s shoulder and squeezed.

“You don’t have to feel guilty about having something nice. I know you’re used to going without. You’ve gone without for a long, long time, Naruto. But I think it would be really something if you could start to let yourself have things. It’s okay. You deserve it. You deserve to be happy.”

Naruto slowly lifted his eyes to Iruka’s face. Shisui and Kakashi looked discretely away, giving the kid what privacy they could as he spilled a few quiet tears.

“Ok. I’ll, uh,” Naruto said, wiping his nose on his arm. “I’ll try, doc.”

Iruka took out a sheaf of papers and tapped them into a neat pile. He placed them in front of Naruto.

“Let’s start with the Minnesota Multiphasic,” he said, checking his wristwatch for the time. “Shisui will sit as proctor. Here’s a pencil.”

Lips pressed to a thin line, Naruto bent his head to the test and began. Kakashi stood, and Iruka followed after.

“You have ninety minutes.”

In the adjoining office, Itachi greeted them with a nod.

“Good afternoon, gentlemen.”

“Special agent,” Kakashi said.

Itachi was sat at a wide oak desk, red reading glasses perched on his slender nose. He looked tired. He was looking tired a lot these days.

Iruka took a seat across the desk, where he could look between Itachi and the two-way mirror to the training area. Kakashi stood against the wall to the side of the mirror, arms crossed.

“He’s on schedule?” Itachi said, rising from his desk to look out over the training floor.

“He’s ahead of schedule in conditioning,” Kakashi said. “He’s significantly behind in tactics and methodologies—on paper. He can’t articulate the theory behind the choices he makes, but his natural sense is spot-on. He’s surprised me with his resourcefulness in the drills we’ve run.”

Itachi hummed and watched the two figures at the table. They were a diptych in contrasting colors, Naruto with his sky blue eyes and cornflower hair, his tawny skin and wide, ever-smiling mouth, Shisui all smooth, pale skin and ink-black hair and sharp, dark eyes.

As though he could feel eyes on him, Shisui turned toward the two-way mirror. He threw a little smirk over his shoulder like he knew Itachi was watching, then turned back to place his hand on the back of Naruto’s chair.

Shisui had grown protective of the young punk in the past months, hovering over him in training, fussing over his nutrition and atrocious sleep habits. They were of a kind: smart, scrappy, unfailingly positive, giving to a fault. Both orphans. Both warm and good humored and quietly aching, with the same unruly hair. Naruto didn’t have Shisui’s genius, that swift and easy mastery anything he put his mind to. Naruto knew he had to work twice as hard as most people to learn things, and he did. But then, from the time his mother died, Shisui had been raised by the Uchiha. And being raised by the Uchiha meant, above all else, an intolerance for failure.

“Well, ‘doc’?” Itachi said with a quirk of his brow. “Will he succeed?”

“He’s a mess,” Iruka said with an affectionate smile. “But he’s a strong mess.”

“I need to know that can hold it together tonight. A lot is riding on the outcome.”

Iruka watched the blonde boy chew the end of his pencil as he worked through the questionnaire. He looked like a school child.

“If he rolls and Sasuke runs back to Orochimaru,” Kakashi said, “it could be years of work down the drain. We’re risking a lot here.”

“And so are they,” Itachi said. “I will not hesitate to nuke the entire operation myself if Sasuke’s life is in danger.”

“You can’t be serious,” Kakashi said. “Not with this much at stake.”

“I can, and I am. Now, to the matter of Naruto.”

“Love is a funny thing,” Iruka said quietly. “It makes some people crack like a glass. And others, it makes them shine.”

Kakashi let a flash of anguish sweep his bicolored eyes before the bland, pleasant smile crinkled them closed.

“What’s the magic formula that keeps a glass from cracking, Dr. Iruka?” he said. “I’d find that kind of thing quite useful in my line of work.”

“It all depends on the strength of a person,” Iruka said. “Whether they’re the type to stay trapped in a cycle of post traumatic stress, or the type to transcend to post traumatic growth.”

Iruka looked to Itachi with a mix of reverence and old, half-buried fear.

“Take yourself for example.”

“By your own assessment,” Itachi said evenly, his voice a rich rumble in the quiet of the soundproofed room, “my trauma has utterly broken me, driving me to jeopardize every redemptive thing I’ve ever built out of my short, sad life, and all for purely emotional reasons.”

“No,” Iruka said softly, clearing his throat against the tightness there. “No. I don’t feel that way anymore. Not knowing what I know now.”

“Is that so,” Itachi said, arching one slim brow.

“Against odds, you’re doing the right thing,” Iruka said, a note of something broken in his voice. “That takes a terrible strength. You’re the type to persevere, to see the right thing through to the end, no matter what the cost.”

Kakashi folded his arms and leaned back against the two way mirror. He rubbed at the light stubble on his face and met Iruka’s dark eyes with his own, black and blue.

“Well. Which type is Naruto?”


	4. Go Your Own Way

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Excessive Use of Force.

The brine and diesel smoke of the harbor stung Sasuke’s nose as he took in a deep, steadying breath. He stepped into navy cargo pants striped with hi-vis reflective material, pulling the wide legs up over his ripped black jeans. Jugo tossed him a safety vest and a construction helmet, and together they dressed. 

“Tide’s gone out.”

“Hm.”

Jugo looked right at home in workwear with his thick arms and worn steel-toe boots. Sasuke looked like a foreman at best, hair too long and ears too pierced and clothes too smart underneath the loud orange vest. It would do as a disguise from a distance, at least.

He looked out over the water as he tucked a hunting knife into his construction trousers. For a moment, the glint of the floodlights on the murky bay was the hard glare of a surgical light on his mother’s unseeing eyes the night he identified the bodies. He sucked two long, shaky breaths in through his nose and closed his eyes against a wave of nausea.

The image was frozen in his mind. His father’s old partner Choza Akimichi had stood by night, waiting while Sasuke screamed until his voice was gone, saying empty things like ‘I’m sorry, son,’ and ‘We’re gonna get the bastards,’ over and over and over. That was six years ago.

“Get Suigetsu on the radio,” Sasuke said.

“Yes, boss.”

All Akimichi ever told him when he called for updates on the case was that it was someone who did business with Orochimaru, someone who got to the Uchihas through their oldest son. Beyond that, the trail of information went cold, disappearing into the darkest part of the night with Itachi.

“Suigetsu’s in position.”

Someone stole the light from their mother’s eyes, turned the lovely dark of them, alive with humor and wit, to a milky, filmy gray. And Sasuke would steal the light from theirs in return, he would watch it flicker out. He would finish what his junkie coward of a brother started, and then he would finally have his rest. The thought calmed him some.

“It’s just about time,” Jugo said.

Sasuke didn’t believe in gods to pray to. But he believed (like his father did when the man was still alive) that it pays to give deference to the will of the universe before throwing yourself into a fire of one kind or another.

“Couriers in position?”

He spared himself a little smile, realizing how similar his work was to that of the late commissioner Fugaku. They were two sides of the same coin with the line of the law between them.

“Yes, boss.”

It would have broken the old man’s heart to know that both his promising sons gave themselves to gangs and violence, but this was Sasuke’s only recourse to get the revenge he burned for.

“What’s wrong?” Jugo said, laying a calming hand on Sasuke’s shoulder. “You look tense.”

“Something doesn’t feel right,” Sasuke said.

The sun seeped down between the cranes on the loading dock, stretching all the shadows, and the longshoremen in the distant yard traded clipboards and handshakes and bits of gossip as the shift turned over.

“There are too many on the receiving end,” Sasuke said. “Too many new faces. I don’t know what Kabuto was thinking.”

“This is a big push,” Jugo said gently. “We can’t handle it alone.”

Sasuke settled his earpiece in place and adjusted the volume.

“Come in, fishface,” he murmured into his collar.

 _“I’m here, boss_ ,” came the answer from the earpiece.

“You’re in place with the truck?”

 _“I’m where I’m supposed to be, yeah_.”

“I want your head on a swivel. I don’t like the air tonight.”

 _“Yeah, yeah, the air. Paranoid much_?”

“I’ll give you a reason to be paranoid if you fuck this up for me, Suigetsu.”

“ _How long’s it been since you got laid, boss? You’re even more anal than normal tonight.”_

Sasuke rubbed his temples. The stress of this delivery was making his eyes hurt.

“ _Karin’ll fix you right up if you let her. You know stress is a silent killer_.”

“Just shut up and be vigilant. And put your phone away. If I find out you’re distracted because you’re in another bidding war for a decorative sword—”

“ _Get out of my head, you witch_ ,” crackled the voice in his ear.

Sasuke sighed. He turned down the volume on the earpiece and led Jugo down to the sorting floor. They waited behind the bulk of a shipping container for the longshoreman on duty to move toward the office for clock out. Kabuto had paid the next man up to skip his shift tonight. All they had to do was neutralize this one, and the operation could start.

“No fatalities. I just want him out. This won’t take us long.”

“Understood,” Jugo said.

Sasuke listened for the approaching footsteps and crept back to give Jugo room. Jugo was quiet, light footed for a big guy, and he shared Sasuke's distaste for wanton killing—most of the time. Get him in the wrong mood and it was a bloodbath. But tonight, Jugo seemed calm and reserved, slowly tightening the man in a headlock until his body went limp, laying him down in the shadow of the shipping container with a near-tenderness.

“Start the countdown,” Sasuke said into his collar.

“ _Cooooopy that_ ,” Suigetsu drawled.

Sasuke fished the keys and credentials off the prone body on the ground and led Jugo down to the sorting floor, where a forklift was parked. Jugo hefted himself up into the cab, and Sasuke tossed him the keys. He double checked the ISOs on the shipping containers to make sure the right ones were there on the packing floor.

They had to unload three 40’ containers before the shift turned over. There were fifty palettes that had to move. Thirty palettes would go into Suigetsu’s reefer truck, and the rest would go into two box trucks sent by Orochimaru’s major distributors. It was Sasuke’s biggest operation to date: fifty-four kilos, almost seven million dollars on the line. If he had help from Jugo, Suigetsu and each of the two couriers, they could unload all three containers in a little over two hours.

“Load up time, Hozuki,” he murmured into his collar.

“ _Gotcha. Help’s right behind me_.”

Sasuke made his way to the service entrance to let the trucks in. He used the stolen credentials to swipe past the office, gave a lazy wave to the bull in the security office, and opened the gate.

Suigetsu pulled his reefer in first. The other two were close behind, old box trucks labeled ‘Ichiraku & Sons Produce.’ It was a good cover; the blocks of cocaine were hidden under piles of imported tomatoes.

“Hey, sailor,” Suigetsu said, pale arm hanging out the window of the cab. Prince’s _Raspberry Beret_ was blaring from the speakers. “Going my way?”

Sasuke hopped up into passenger seat, and Suigetsu led the caravan back toward the packing floor.

“Where’d you find these kids?” Suigetsu said, turning down the radio. “They’re suss as fuck.”

“Gaara is western distro’s top pick. I was told to let him handle his end. Apparently, he’s good at his job.”

“Your lil friend seems to think so,” Suigetsu said.

Suigetsu knew that Gaara was SHUKAKU. And he also knew that one of Sasuke’s worst buttons to press was KURAMA, second only to Itachi and the murder of his family. 

“Way they been hitting it,” he said, because he lived to press Sasuke’s buttons, “they must be together every night.”

Sasuke balled his fists so tight his knuckles cracked, but said nothing.

When they parked in the loading area, Gaara was already moving to help Jugo with the loading. Sasuke gave him a terse nod, shoving back the acid in his throat. Job first, feelings later. Once the product was clear, he’d have plenty of time to size the punk up, even square up if he really wanted to, if he needed the release.

Sasuke walked up to the cab of the second Ichiraku truck, intending to get a read on the driver. The door opened, and the driver hopped down.

Sasuke took a step back, wincing like he’d been hit by a shockwave.

“Oh shit,” Naruto said, a sad sad smile on his face. “It’s you.”

Sasuke froze. It had been hard enough in the club months ago, with the distance and the smoke. There, he could almost imagine Naruto was a ghost, an apparition sent to haunt him. But he knew then by the way all eyes in the room seemed to dance over the blonde’s lively figure that the other boy was all too real. He felt a wave of nausea hit as he remembered the two girls with their soft pouts and painted eyes pressing up against him, drinking him up like they had any right to even look. Sasuke could hardly bear to look at him then, even from a distance.

“Naruto.”

“Hey.”

Here, just a few feet away, it was impossible. Naruto was a little taller, and he’d filled out since the last time Sasuke saw him up close. He had a quiet confidence about him now, a solidity and an understated grace that left Sasuke grieving for how much he’d missed in two years—how much he missed Naruto.

“S’good to see you, man.”

“…hm.”

The puckish mischief in the bittersweet smile was cut under by the steel intensity in the blue, blue eyes.

“So? Where to, boss?”

Two years in Orochimaru’s command had hardened Sasuke, made him clever and strong and focused. He had grown into his own skin, grown up and over and past all of Orochimaru’s other underlings by his own sweat and blood and bone-deep determination to see his objective through. But Naruto, unpredictable Naruto, had somehow kept pace from a distance.

“Come with me. We’re on a tight schedule.”

The quiet obedience when Naruto fell in step behind him made Sasuke feel nauseous. There it was again, this feeling of power, too much power over one person for Sasuke to wield. He didn’t trust himself with that power. Too big a part of him wanted to use it to command the blonde to his side, to slip him into the ranks next to Jugo and keep him there, close, watched.

But he gave up that right when he left the boy bleeding in the street, when he glimpsed the slim ghost of his brother in the chaos of the helicopter-floodlit night and decided that chasing his demons was more important than whatever Naruto or graffiti or the distant idea of civilian life had to offer.

“Fucking tomatoes, huh,” Naruto said with a laugh in his voice. “Guess some things never change.”

Sasuke’s skin went tight with goosebumps. It was as though no time had passed at all. The instant intimacy was like a rasp on his raw nerves. It was a distracting pull, like tactile white noise.

“Reminisce later. I want us done and out ASAP.”

“Yes, sir, right away, sir,” Naruto mumbled. “You always were a bossy bitch.”

Focus. Sasuke could push away the prickling in his guts, he could box it up and stow it away in the back of his mind and forget it there forever, if he could just get through this night.

In the rhythm of the loading, it became easier. The four of them slipped into step, and Sasuke was at the top, easy, directing clear and precise, and Gaara didn’t challenge him with anything more than those mean green eyes.

“Two more palettes,” Gaara said.

With the couriers quick and organized and responsive, they were ahead of schedule. Gaara had a subtle, silent way of directing Naruto. Naruto was too compliant, too quiet, too readily responsive to Gaara’s every gesture. It made Sasuke irrationally angry, which made him feel shame, which made him anxious, which broke his focus which—

“Reefer’s loaded,” Jugo said from the forklift cab.

“Pull it down the drive, we’ll get the box trucks in position.”

“Gotcha, boss,” Suigetsu said. “Catch ya on the out.”

He turned to give instruction to the courier pair, only to find that they were already moving, jumping up into their trucks with an eerie sync. Sasuke gripped the knifehandle that stuck up at his hip, just to have something to do with his hands.

“Yours first,” he said as Gaara passed back toward Jugo.

“Right.”

Sasuke stood, arms crossed, eyes unfocused. He had to gather himself. A box truck loadup was a two man job. He could spare a moment of meditation, some time to return to himself.

“You look fucking exhausted.”

He bit down the snippy reply that queued in his throat. Took a deep breath, and then— a feedback whine in his ear made him wince and jerk the earpiece halfway out. A cold weight settled in the pit of his stomach.

“Feds,” Gaara grit, sprinting at them. He grabbed Naruto by the elbow and pulled. “We’re out of here. Leave the trucks.”

 _“It’s a bust_ ,” Suigetsu’s voice crackled from the tiny speaker. “ _They’re coming from the north gate and behind the office. Probably have the service gate surrounded.”_

“Get Jugo and get the fuck out of here,” Sasuke hissed into the earpiece as he tucked himself between the trucks.

“ _What about_ —”

“Leave the shipment to me, Suigetsu. I want you out.”

Naruto stumbled a few steps away and twisted out of Gaara’s grasp.

“Bad business,” Naruto said with a grimace of a smile. “You go south, be better if we split.”

Gaara wheeled around, growling.

“He’s not worth it, Naruto. Let’s go.”

“No can do, cactus kid,” Naruto said with a wry smile. He pressed his palm to the center of Gaara’s chest and gave a gentle push.

Sasuke took a second to savor the animal anger on Gaara’s face, the green eyes wide and gleaming, muscles in the jaw bunching with barely contained rage.

“If you don’t come out of this alive, I’ll kill you,” Gaara breathed, voice just a touch shaky, though only Naruto, familiar with the subtle changes in the redhead’s even voice, could tell.

“Catch you on the flip, skip,” he said with a wink. He jerked his head toward the loading bay, and Gaara ran.

“Get down, usuratonkachi,” Sasuke hissed.

Naruto ducked down at Sasuke’s feet, crouching in the shadow of the truck cab. He watched Gaara slip into the streams of dark that flowed between the shipping containers. The guy was fast, even faster without Naruto to look out for. He was up and over a high fence in the distance in less than a minute.

“Our best option is to try and wait it out in the shipping yard,” Naruto whispered.

“POLICE! Come out with your hands above your head.”

“We’re already fucked, idiot,” Sasuke said with a wince. “I’m gonna approach them. You run into the yard when they sight me.”

“And leave you alone? No thanks,” Naruto said, cracking his knuckles.

“Naruto,” Sasuke said, and there was a command in it, thick and desperate and hot with anger.

“I REPEAT, come out with your hands above your head.”

The voice was closer now. Naruto stood, edging forward to put himself between Sasuke and the voice.

“Get the fuck back, moron—”

“FREEZE!”

They were momentarily blinded by the shine of a flashbang. Sasuke squinted in the smoke, ears ringing, Naruro’s ragged cough muted in his ear. Slowly, the shapes of the SWAT team, masked and heavily armed, twisted into focus. The point man, rifle raised, stared Naruto down with his bicolored eyes.

“Don’tcha think the smoke’s a bit much?” Naruto said, slowly lifting his palms to shoulder height.

“Turn around,” Kakashi said evenly.

“Must be a rough time to be a cop, huh, if you’ve got your panties all twisted over some fucking tomatoes.”

“Shut the fuck up, moron,” Sasuke hissed, voice pinched.

They were surrounded, trapped between the line of raised rifles and the box truck.

“You there, hands up,” Shisui said behind his mask, pointing his rifle at Sasuke.

“Turn around slowly,” Kakashi repeated, “and put your hands behind your back.”

Naruto faced Sasuke as he turned, a resigned smile on his face. Sasuke felt a hot flash of anger. This was somehow the idiot’s fault.

“If I gotta go down, at least I get to go down with you, right, asshole?”

“Shut up, short bus.”

Sasuke felt brittle, shaken, paler even than usual. His dark eyes were wide but lifeless, that same dead resignation Naruto saw through the smoke of the dancehall. The downturned pout of his lip was petulant, a child with his hand caught in the cookie jar. But his hands were rock steady and his body was spring-tight with the will to fight.

“Gonna tie me up and have your way with me, you fuckin perv?” Naruto said as Kakashi slipped a cuff around one of his wrists.

“Shut your mouth, faggot,” said an unfamiliar voice from the line of armored bodies.

Sasuke met Naruto’s eyes, and he felt the crackle of heat, the easy slip into old habits and old patterns, the pull to the dance where they’d press back-to-back and lay out groups of four and five and six with gleeful ease. It was a close thing, borderline exhibitionist, when the sticky nap of blood on their ragged fists made their breath come out in gasps and choked laughter, the only thing (aside from pulling off a heist of a graffiti piece) that could even remotely scratch the itch of the nameless hunger between them.

Sasuke’s eyes went cold and slitted, and he inched his left foot forward, the old signal that he was ready to go.

“Hey, pig,” Naruto spat, writhing in Kakashi’s one-handed grip. “Suck on this.”

Before Kakashi could get the second cuff closed, Naruto crouched low and spun. Kakashi caught his fist, then brought the stock of his rifle down on the back of Naruto’s head with a quick, sickening crack. The sound echoed in the stunned silence.

“That’s ex-excessive use of force, asshole,” Naruto said, dropping to his knees, the world around him going fuzzy and dim.

“I’ll _kill_ you,” came a voice from the dark.

The last thing Naruto saw before the world went black was Sasuke, teeth bared, surging forward with his knife fisted in his pale hand. His eyes were blazing, almost glowing with fury, and alive again at last, so alive and fierce-dark and beautiful that Naruto was sure the warm drops trickling down his cheeks were relieved and happy tears.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was really amused to find out during my research that there was an actual $7 million cocaine drug bust involving tomatoes. That’s a real story. It was too perfect not to include.


	5. Sasuke, Calm Down

“C’mon, cuz. Calm down.”

Sasuke’s vision went in and out as he panted, teetering on the edge of hyperventilating. His hands were white and trembling as he cradled Naruto’s bleeding head in his lap, their bodies slumped together in the back of Shisui’s Jeep.

“He’s concussed. Take—take us to the hospital.”

“My friend was a medic, he’s gonna meet us at the house.”

Sasuke’s head swam as he tried to piece together the last five hours. He blacked out after the cop took Naruto down. He remembered fragments of a quick fight: the line descended on him en masse and someone got his knife off of him. He got a few hits in, but with the cops in SWAT gear the hits fell muted and ineffective. Naruto got the shit kicked out of him, even though he was already down. Sasuke took a few hits himself, most of them body shots, before Shisui hauled him up and shoved him against the side of the truck while the other cop cuffed him.

“He’s passed out. What if he’s got an aneurism. Or internal injuries, he—”

“That kid’s tough,” Shisui said, meeting Sasuke’s eyes in the rear view. “We’re almost there.”

Booking was a blur. Naruto came to in the squad car and stayed conscious but loopy through the breakneck processing. They were printed, photographed, searched, examined, interviewed and dumped in a holding cell with unusual speed and carelessness. Naruto wanted to talk, wanted to use all that training in psychology to reestablish a report, to start to build the trust upon which all good conversions hinge. But his guts ached and his head throbbed and his nose kept slowly dripping blood. In the end, Sasuke told him to shut the fuck up and rest, and he complied, because for the first time in years, Sasuke held him. Held him cradled against his chest, fiercely protective and angry and scared. And Naruto was tired and—maybe this was a way to build trust, sympathy. Maybe this was a window back in.

They sat like that, huddled on the piss-stained floor of the cell, for only an hour or two before they were tightly informed that someone had posted their bail. Shisui released them himself, to Sasuke’s confusion and discomfort. The two hadn’t spoken in over two years.

“Why are we out, Shisui? What did you do?”

They’d been R.O.R.’d. It was inconceivable. Naruto resisted arrest, and Sasuke—Sasuke had charged a SWAT team with a hunting knife. That’s to say nothing of the millions of dollars in pure cocaine that they left behind. They should have been remanded, sent upstate to rot and wait for the formality of a trial.

“It’s complicated, but it’ll all make sense soon.” In the front seat, Shisui was tense and quiet. “Just try and stay calm. We’ll talk when we get back to base.”

Naruto stirred, turning in Sasuke’s lap. He cracked one bleary blue eye.

“G’morning, sunshine,” he said.

“You fucking moron,” Sasuke said, voice breaking. He lightly slapped Naruto’s face, but left his palm there, thumb stroking gently over the whisker scars. “Stay awake.”

Naruto leaned into his palm, lip trembling.

“Eyes on me, usuratonkachi. Stay with me.”

“I know what that means, teme,” Naruto rasped.

Sasuke gave a short, broken laugh. Naruto forced his heavy eyelids to obey, gaze locked on Sasuke’s red-rimmed eyes.

“Hah! You were worried.”

“Not even.”

Shisui picked a circuitous route back to the underground garage he’d taken Naruto to that first night, paranoid they’d been followed. He pulled the Jeep into a parking space out of sight from the gate and windows and turned to look back at the boys.

“Cuz. Whatever happens, I want you to try and stay calm. Okay? Can you do that for me?”

“I am calm,” Sasuke grit. “Now help me get him somewhere he can sit up.”

Shisui rounded the Jeep to help Sasuke brace Naruto up and out of the car.

“Open mind and calm heart, okay?” Shisui said.

“Confucius say calm down, Sas’ke,” Naruto said. “Ochitsuide kutasai.”

“Close, kid, but not quite,” Shisui said, looping his arm under Naruto’s shoulder.

“Who the fuck taught you that, usuratonkachi?” Sasuke said, slippping his hand around Naruto’s waist from the other side.

“I been getting learned real hard,” Naruto said, grinning. The grin triggered a wince, and the wince crinkled his nose, and a thick red trail of half-clotted blood dripped down over his lip.

“I can’t believe you let them rock us,” Sasuke said, shooting Shisui a wounded glare.

“I can’t believe you think you’re Pablo Escobar. For fuck’s sake, Sasuke, if you need money—”

“It’s not about the money,” Sasuke said. “It’s not about that.”

“Just,” Shisui said, looking at him over Naruto’s bowed head. “I’m here, okay? I always have been and I always will be. For whatever you need.”

Sasuke sniffed and kept his eyes straight forward as Shisui swiped them inside the building.

Kakashi was waiting for them in the beige-bland hotel suite, leaning against the kitchen island. He threw up a hand in greeting, putting the bulk of his body between the boys and the living room.

“Sup, cap,” Naruto said, leaning heavily into Sasuke’s side.

“Welcome, Sasuke,” Kakashi said. “I’m sorry we had to meet the way we did earlier.”

Sasuke bristled.

“How are you feeling, Naruto? Let me get you some ice.”

“Back off, 5-O,” Sasuke said, torn between jumping the man and keeping Naruto balanced against his shoulder. “Talk to him and I’ll kill you.”

“Sas—” Naruto winced. “Sas’ke, it’s cool. He’s cool.”

“He almost cracked your skull, moron. You really want me to be cool?”

“Open mind, cuz, please,” Shisui said. “There’s a lot we need to talk about.”

“You’re fucking right there is,” Sasuke hissed. “If somebody doesn’t tell me what the fuck is going on—”

“Language, language, little brother,” came a smooth, dark voice from deeper in the living room.

Sasuke paled. He’d had glimpses, he’d heard rumors. He had chased and chased and chased, tired and angry and sad and confused, and he’d gotten close once or twice. But it had been six long years since he heard his brother’s voice.

“I thought our mother taught you better than that.”

There it was, the voice that haunted him. Only the reality of it was darker, richer, more horrifying than he ever remembered it being in the sweat-damp electric hum of waking from a nightmare.

“Itachi,” Sasuke said, voice a hoarse whisper.

Kakashi stepped in as Sasuke stumbled. He helped Shisui walk both boys to the couch.

“Why don’t you two have a seat.”

Sasuke had imagined meeting his brother again a thousand times. He imagined Itachi bone-thin, strung out and sallow, wearing clubbing clothes or the grimy black thermals he would wear to go paint. He imagined the young and strong and healthy brother of his childhood, the one with kind, sad eyes and premature jadedness. He imagined Itachi like a specter, looming with eyes bright and pale hands raised, ready to send Sasuke to the place their parents went. He did not imagine this.

“It’s truly wonderful to see you, Sasuke. It’s been far too long.”

Itachi was seated languidly in a chair across the coffee table. He wore a slim-cut black suit pinstriped in blood red, hair tied tight and smart at the base of his neck. He had a gold and garnet ring, red Prada shoes, a gold chain peeking through the open buttons of his red silk shirt. He didn’t quite look healthy, but he was solid and strong and eerily calm, a bodhisattva lingering just this side of the mortal plane on a whim, somehow bored of nirvana. He looked older, weary around the piercing eyes, and darkly dangerous, as though he could see under Sasuke’s skin.

“How. Why, after all this time. Why.”

“Sas’ke,” Naruto said, laying a palm on Sasuke’s thigh. “He’s with the FBI. They’re tryna help us.”

“And you?” Sasuke said, venom in his voice. “You’re with them now? A snitch?”

“Call in Iruka,” Itachi said. “We want to make sure our friend here is hale and hearty, don’t we, Sasuke?”

Shisui ducked into one of the adjoining rooms. He returned with a bright red EMT trauma kit slung over his shoulder and Iruka close behind.

“Hey there, squirt.”

“What’s up, doc,” Naruto said with a red-tinged grin.

Sasuke looked incredulously between Naruto and the young doctor. Shisui stood behind the couch and laid his broad palms on Sasuke’s shoulders, half to comfort, half to ground.

“Soon, cuz. Patience.”

Iruka took out some clean linen and dabbed at Naruto’s cuts. He lifted Naruto’s shirt to prod at the growing bruises.

“No broken ribs.”

“Oh cool,” Naruto said. “Cool.”

He shined a light into Naruto’s sky-blue eyes.

“How many fingers?”

“Three.”

“What’s your name?”

“Naruto Uzumaki, lean, mean, finest cat you ever seen, gonna king this city before I’m twenty, believe it.”

“Recite the alphabet backwards, please,” Iruka said.

Naruto pushed out his lower lip and frowned.

“Z, Y, X, W, S, uh. Are you for fuckin real, doc? I can’t do that on a good day and you know it.”

Iruka turned to Itachi.

“I already reviewed his intake exam from the precinct. He’ll need ice and ibuprofen for the bruising. He’s got a slight concussion,” he said, turning to Kakashi. “Someone should stay with him for the next twenty-four hours, make sure he doesn’t pass out in his sleep.”

Kakashi looked pointedly at Sasuke.

“I’ll watch him,” Sasuke said. “But will someone tell me what the fuck is going on?”

Shisui and Kakashi took their seats on either side of Itachi. Iruka perched on the arm of the couch next to Naruto. The room looked expectantly toward Itachi, though only Sasuke looked up into his eyes.

“Do you remember when we still lived together? Six, nearly seven years ago now?”

“How could I forget?” Sasuke spat. “You were a junked up whore, and you tortured our mother with your constant acting out. You wrote and you sold and you fucked around and you came home fucked up every god damn night.”

Itachi’s thick-lashed eyes fluttered closed. When he opened them again, they were clear and sad.

“Eight years ago, our father came to me with a proposition. A way I could help an investigation he was heading.”

Shisui shifted anxiously in his chair, balling and unballing his fists.

“I was sixteen years old. I was smart and bored and yes, I’d acted out some in school, just like you did, little brother. Skipping grades only made it worse. I couldn’t relate to my peers, and my classes were still entirely unstimulating. I had potential, but no outlet.”

Itachi cleared his throat and crossed his long legs.

“Our father saw in my potential an opportunity for the both of us. He asked me to go undercover to gather information about a minor drug ring they were pursuing. They were targeting young people, and with the right clothes I fit the demographic.”

Sasuke’s fists were tight and trembling in his lap. Naruto reached for one and gently spread the fingers open until he could slot his own inside.

“I went in deep. I went so deep that our father’s team was not only able to bust the small ring, but start on the cartel behind it. I was working my way into that organization when my cover was blown.”

“An Akatsuki capo discovered that Itachi was the commissioner’s son,” Kakashi began. “There was an ultimatum: give up the commissioner or die.”

“I discussed it with our father. If I gave him to Akatsuki, they would make me one of them. And they would spare you and mother.”

“You bartered with dad’s life.”

Shisui’s eyes slid closed. He steepled his fingers in front of his forehead.

“Father had confidence in his ability to protect himself,” Itachi said quietly. “He underestimated the Akatsuki.”

“You let them murder him,” Sasuke said, voice hollow. “You let them murder mom.”

Naruto’s eyes stung. He stared down at their joined hands, both tense-white and clammy.

“It was his choice to protect us,” Itachi said. “To protect me. And to make sure you were spared any part in all this.”

“So what,” Sasuke said, voice tight and hoarse. “You’ve been a good guy the whole time, and I’m just supposed to accept that you meant well? That it was an accident mom and dad got killed?”

“No,” Itachi said.

“You want me to forgive you and forget about that night, like I haven’t already tried? Itachi, I’ll never forget.”

“Neither will I,” Itachi said, quiet and clear. “And I will never ask your forgiveness for this, Sasuke.”

“Good. Because I don’t forgive you. Fuck you,” Sasuke said. “Fuck you and fuck the police and fuck the FBI.”

Itachi sat back, his eyes clouded with an unreadable sentiment.

“Everything I’ve done the past six years, it’s all been for you. To make the world safe for you. To give you an opportunity to move on and live your life in freedom,” he said, leaning forward. “You weren’t supposed to get caught up in this. You were supposed to be the one who moved beyond.”

“I’m not that kind of person, Itachi. I can’t just let it go, what happened to them.”

“I know,” Itachi said, sighing. “I know. I have not been a good brother to you, Sasuke, though I have tried in the best way I knew how. All I can offer you now is revenge.”

Sasuke laughed, dark and broken and mean.

“Revenge. That’s the compensation I get for six years of agony. That’s what I get for our mother’s life. Don’t make me part of your pity party, you fucking sociopath. I won’t help you feel better about this.”

“Cuz, it goes way deeper than that,” Shisui said. “Just listen.”

“What do you think happened to the blocks of cocaine you left at the port, Sasuke?” Kakashi said.

Naruto’s eyes darted around the room.

“Y’know, I kinda been wondering that myself.”

Itachi lifted a folder from the coffee table and tipped it open with a slim finger. There were candid photos inside, of police, FBI agents, border patrol, tobacco and firearms agents. There were senators, governors, ambassadors. CEOs and finance moguls. Heads of state from other nations.

“Akatsuki, all of them. Some of them are Orochimaru’s, some a man named Nagato’s. Some answer to Obito. Some answer to me.”

Naruto sat back, slack-jawed.

“The law enforcement personnel assigned to your raid are in Orochimaru’s pocket,” Kakashi said. “We answer to Itachi, who has equity in this shipment. It’s why we were included. The drugs were always meant to go to Akatsuki in the end.”

“So you threw him in,” Sasuke said, tossing his hand at Naruto, “just to fuck with me?”

“Naruto was in the right place at the right time,” Shisui said. “He wants what we want—to have you back. Have you safe.”

“How did you even find him?” Sasuke said, glaring at Itachi.

“He was on the shortlist for recruitment by another capo. You know how quickly Orochimaru burns through his dealers,” Kakashi said. “Itachi stepped in before Obito could get to him.”

“So,” Naruto said, clearing his throat. All eyes turned to him. “So you’re like. Not just a fed. You’re a big time gangster.”

Itachi lifted his shoulder, the barest hint of a shrug. Neither confirmation nor denial.

“Then…whose interest do you act in?” Sasuke said, glad that the tight press of Naruto’s hand kept his own from shaking as he met his brother’s cold, dark eyes.

“I spy on Akatsuki for the government, and I infiltrate the government for Akatsuki. Like the snake that eats its own tail. The ever-turning wheel.” Itachi looked down at his hands, long fingers tipped in glossy black. “I am interested to protect what’s right. To minimize the damage to the general public. To steer both ships away from the civilian body of this country, and toward each other instead.”

His eyes slid shut, brows furrowing.

“I do this for the victims of the drug trade. Of the sex trade.” He went quiet and still, dark eyes slitted and sad. He looked to Shisui. “I do this for the Uchiha,” he said. “I act in the interest of our family. What’s left of it.”

He looked to Sasuke.

“I act in your interest, because you’re all I have left. Because I love you, Sasuke, and I want you to have a future.”

Shisui laid his big hand on Itachi’s forearm and squeezed. Itachi leaned into the touch, and Naruto could read a weariness in his thick-lashed eyes.

“Orochimaru wanted you, Sasuke, because you’re a valuable asset—for your strength and your intellect, and as a sort of insurance against me. He thinks that if he has you in his coils, I won’t touch him. So far, that’s been quite true. It’s why he made it so when this dog and pony show of a raid was over, you would be released without issues.”

“Shit,” Naruto said, leaning back. “I just don’t see an end to it. If we got out because the whole PD is dirty, Orochimaru’ll want Sasuke back. This is all gonna keep on going forever. Something’s gotta give.”

Itachi smiled, a dead-eyed, resigned slip of his white teeth against the red of his mouth. It chilled the room. Iruka crossed and uncrossed his legs. Even stoic Kakashi rubbed a hand over the stubble on his chin.

“Sasuke will return to Orochimaru,” Itachi said. “It's the only way.”

“We need to depose him,” Kakashi said. “In a way that leaves both of you free from retaliation from the Akatsuki chain of command.”

“You’re our lynchpin, little brother. You take him out from the inside,” Itachi said, voice low. “And when you do, I’ll deliver him to you. The one who killed father and mother.”

Sasuke swallowed.

“Why haven’t you—”

“I thought we could kill him together. I thought it would bring you closure.”

Shisui scrubbed his hands over his face and sighed. Naruto looked at the floor, ears red, shoulders tense. Sasuke ground his teeth, eyes locked on Itachi’s, rage on rage on rage welling up and threatening to spill.

“Orochimaru wanted you for himself, and despite my best efforts, he got you. Because you wanted to go to him, Sasuke.”

Sasuke frowned.

“You shouldn’t have involved Naruto. You’re using him to get to me, the same way Orochimaru is using me to get to you. You’re the same trash.”

“I involved myself, asshole,” Naruto said. “Spent two years trying to track down your ass, and here I am.”

“Naruto was next on the list. Obito would have ruined him,” Shisui said.

Sasuke grit his teeth and squeezed Naruto’s hand.

“At least, as Itachi’s recruit, he’s relatively safe,” Kakashi said.

“Don’t you wanna know a life outside this insanity?” Shisui said. “You’re so smart, Sasuke. You’re both good kids. You could do so much better than this.”

Naruto stared at the ground. Thinking about the future, dreaming of more than the next big piece, the next big panel, it wasn’t something he did, as a rule. Until lately. Sasuke, for his part, never once imagined life beyond revenge for the death of his family.

“I’m not asking you to forgive me,” Itachi said. “I’m offering you the chance to kill the man who killed our parents. And I’m offering freedom from this world, for yourself and those you hold dear. It’s the best I can possibly give. My final offering.”

Sasuke took a deep breath in.

“I can’t let you leave this room until I know what you plan to do,” Itachi said lightly, leaning back in his chair.

Sasuke closed his eyes. Lost, fractured, strung out on stress, something shifted in him. He looked to the person at his side. Naruto’s hair was streaked pink and matted where the blood had dried, but his eyes were even and clear. He squeezed Sasuke’s hand.

“Do what you wanna do. I’m in either way. I’m always in for you, Sas’ke.”

Sasuke felt the weight of his own betrayal fall around him like bricks. He didn’t deserve Naruto’s uncanny devotion. His natural selfishness broke the barrier of his shame, and it was easy then, to want, to tip on the cusp of possession, of coveting. Kill the murderer; it was a heady thought. It made Sasuke want to try out all the ways, to find a suitable method. He would finally scratch that darkest itch.

Naruto’s blue eyes glinted.

“I mean it. I’ll follow you down to hell and drag you all the way back if I have to.”

Sasuke knew those eyes. Those were the eyes that didn’t back down from anything. Those were the eyes that changed the outcome forever in their favor, and nothing could turn them around. They were eyes that bore into Sasuke snd hobbled his hatred. He sat up straight.

“Naruto, this doesn’t even concern—”

“Nuh-uh. Shh. I just got you back, you’re fucking stuck with me now. If you’re in, I’m in.”

In for a penny, in for a pound. In for fifty-four kilos. Sasuke nodded.

“We get my associates out too,” he said. “Jugo and Karin and Suigetsu.”

“It’s settled, then,” Itachi said, leaning back. “We take out Orochimaru. I’ll leverage my position to force an opening.”

“What about the meeting of the Akatsuki captains?” Kakashi said.

“I’ll find a reason to insist it happens here this year,” Itachi said, folding his slim hands in his lap. “We’ll strike then.”

“Akatsuki is large and well organized. But we have a fire and a will that they don’t. A few more able participants, and I have full confidence we can pull off a coup,” Kakashi said.

Naruto sucked the tang of copper from his teeth and grinned.

“You need some warm bodies who can fuck shit up, huh? I think I got just the crew.”


	6. Breakfast Club at Coney Island High

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Freudian slip of the wrist.

_Nine Months Later_

Shisui ran the blade over the whetstone in smooth, easy swipes. Gentle, repetitive, like a mantra. It required just enough of his focus to quiet down all other thoughts. His bowie knife, a match to the one he gave Sasuke, came first. Then he would do the various stilettos and balisongs that Itachi favored.

“Nice night for a ride,” he said, lifting his face to the breeze that came in through the open window.

Beside him, at the workbench in the detached garage, Itachi slowly, lovingly serviced their guns.

“Mmm. Could take the mountain pass.”

He wrinkled his nose at the solvent smell as he brushed out the barrels on Shisui’s Glock 22, then his own Beretta. Shisui smiled.

“That’s cute.”

Itachi blinked at him.

“That’s freudian of you to think so.”

“No, you minx,” Shisui said, tapping Itachi’s forehead. “That thing you do with your nose.”

“I do no such thing.”

Itachi took up a stiffer brush and worked some solvent into the bore of his silencer.

“Are the fumes bad? I’ll put the fan on,” Shisui said, moving toward the switch. “Your lungs, you shouldn’t even be doing this.”

Itachi grabbed his forearm, stilling him.

“I want to hear the birds. I’m all right.”

Shisui glanced out the garage door at the big willow tree. A robin was trilling on a high branch.

“All right,” he said. Indulgent. Since they were children, Shisui took a special pleasure in indulging Itachi’s esoteric wants.

The Uchihas took him in when he was five. His mother had been killed. Itachi was a newborn, and a wonder to Shisui, a tiny god whose whims stirred the whole house up, whose growing personality occupied Shisui’s mind till the thought of his mother with her heel kicked off, red like the puddle of blood she died in, faded like a fever dream.

Following his line of sight, Itachi smiled, sad and small.

“Will you put my ashes there?” he said. Carefully even, but quiet. Almost sorry. “The ones you don’t put with my parents.”

Shisui closed his eyes for a moment, then nodded. It was harder than ever not to indulge Itachi. Every little want was another last chance at something they refused to name.

“Of course. It’ll be nice to have you close.”

Itachi braced his elbows against the workbench for leverage as he worked a brush through the baffle. The motion made the shorter hairs slip free of his loose ponytail.

“You’ll get grease in your hair,” Shisui said, putting down the knife he was sharpening. He slipped behind Itachi and gathered up the loose black strands. He slipped the hair tie off and let the long, pin-straight locks spill over his fingers.

“Any excuse with you,” Itachi said, voice light with affection. He leaned back against Shisui’s chest.

“It’s just, from a tactical standpoint,”Shisui said as he sectioned out the glossy locks, “this is a superior hairstyle.”

He began to weave them into a neat plait.

“Hmm. Perhaps you’re right.”

Shisui tied the end of the braid up and dropped it over Itachi’s shoulder. He brushed against the sensitive skin under Itachi’s ear as he withdrew his hand. Itachi shivered.

“You cold?” Shisui said. “Got some sweats upstairs.”

“Subtle,” Itachi said, eyes flashing. “But my gun won’t oil itself.”

Shisui smiled, wide and bright, and bent over to the whetstone again.

Itachi ran a q-tip along the threads of the silencer. He flicked the braid over his shoulder. Looked sidelong at Shisui, who was still smiling.

“I won’t say it.”

“You don’t have to say it. I can tell,” Shisui said, trying hard to wrestle his grin into a more serious shape. “I can always tell when you’re thinking it.”

Itachi carefully dried each piece with a rag. Brushed lubricant over the slides and action.

“You know,” he said as he began to assemble his Beretta, “you’re the only one I’ve ever known who isn’t afraid to look inside my head.”

Itachi worked the slide a few times to distribute the lubricant. He slid the safety on, then off again.

“You’re the only one,” he said, amused at himself. “But one is enough, I suppose.”

Shisui bent to his work and listened for the birds in the willow and the soft sound of Itachi breathing, and he did not think about what was to come.

*

The house on the inlet was in Iruka’s name, a quaint but spacious bi-level in a quiet residential neighborhood just outside the city. It had five bedrooms and a big yard and a view of the bay from the attic. It was the home his mother had grown up in, the one he had grown up in himself, before he went to live with an aunt in the city. He never knew his father. His mother died in a robbery-turned-homicide when Iruka was nine. The perpetrator was a former cop with a dishonorable discharge, desperate and unhinged and armed.

Iruka would be lying to himself if he said it didn’t push him toward his job with the FBI doing evals on law enforcement in long-term UC situations where psychological resilience wore thin. It was a good career: satisfying, if challenging. It made him feel like he’d made something good from the senseless tragedy of his youth. It hadn’t left much time for a partner, let alone children, but Iruka kept telling himself the time would eventually come when he’d have the big family he always privately dreamed of.

In fact, the time came right under Iruka’s nose, blindsiding him with the force of anywhere from six to fifteen bodies on a given day.

It was an idea Naruto cooked up with Kakashi, that they could find a little space off the beaten path to gather their forces and prepare for Itachi’s strike. Naruto and his little crew of vandals rotated in and out, some with more permanence than others, as they all were vetted and then trained in turns by Kakashi and Shisui, and evaluated by Iruka.

There was a small library tucked between the living room and the covered porch that served as Iruka’s at-home office, and one by one the kids found their way inside. What started with simple evaluations and personality inventories turned into ongoing therapy with each member of the street militia. After his days at the bureau offices, he would spend long hours listening to the kids detail their abuses until evening bled into night and sometimes morning.

Some, like Naruto, came at regular intervals, weekly or biweekly, opening slowly like cabbage roses, revealing layers on layers of depth and experience from sublime to harrowing. Others, like Gaara, came only once or twice, but sat long hours when they did, detailing the kinds of lives Iruka could only distantly comprehend, though what little he did understand made him choked with grief. Sasuke was the last to open up, and then only fractionally, though Iruka felt that he could see clear into the boy’s heart, reflected as it was in Naruto.

Iruka’s own heart had never been more full.

He was already becoming deeply attached to late-night ontological debates with the sleepless, emotionally stilted but sharp-witted Gaara. He loved the way Kankuro’s eyes would flicker with interest over old posters and ticket stubs tucked around the house, demanding recounts of all the shows he’d seen at CBGBs and Coney Island High. He took such simple pleasure in watching the terse but tender way Temari and Shikamaru moved around each other in the mornings, him brewing huge pots of coffee and her cooking a dozen or two dozen eggs at a time to feed the ravenous crew. He felt a swelling pride when Kiba brought his sweet but shy girlfriend over, knowing that the boy didn’t have any other family to bring her home to, knowing that he trusted Iruka to fill that role.

Naruto brought others, three tough older kids from Shisui’s MMA gym—now his own—and two girls he knew from graffiti. The girls, Ino and Sakura, filled the house with effervescent chatter, lending it a feminine softness that Temari with her points and angles and Siouxie-Sioux eyeliner never did. Iruka had more than once come home to Naruto sprawled on the carpet with the girls, drunk on boxed wine and gossiping like hens, the chorus of their laughter champagne-sweet and just as bubbly.

Sasuke was an unwelcome guest at first to everyone but Naruto. Iruka worried after him most. The weight of the operation bore down on his ever-broadening shoulders, and it aged him. He grew his bangs out, started dressing more like the leader that he was. He was as quiet as ever, with a viper’s temper, lashing out with his sharp tongue at anyone who tried him. It took weeks of Kiba and Shikamaru and Gaara circling him like angry baboons until Naruto in a fit of frustration laid Kiba out so bad that his eye was swollen shut for days. Nobody stepped to Sasuke after that.

Sasuke only ever fought with the kids from the gym, two older boys named Lee and Neji, and then only for what they claimed was fun (though their ‘fun’ had Iruka dipping into his trauma kit for sutures and iodine more than once).

Slowly but surely, there was a change happening in the youngest Uchiha. To balance the hard set of his jaw and the cold, analytical cast of his dark eyes, Sasuke was developing a delicate, uncanny vulnerability that Iruka attributed to entirely Naruto. Naruto who was thriving in the bustle of the growing family, radiating his unique brand of foul-mouthed, ebullient light.

There were dark moments too, when the kids brawled over petty nothings, when they grifted from Iruka or each other, when they came home fucked up or loaded with racked paint and clothes, when they disappeared for weeks at a time, leaving the rest to wonder if they’d ever return. There were tears and promises made and broken and made again, ultimatums and oceans of patience. There was reconciliation, and slowly, slowly, there was progress.

It had been a grueling nine months since the kids started to fill the home on the inlet with their sounds and their moods and their meager belongings. Iruka was tired and emotionally spent more often than not, and he was starting to dip into his savings just to keep the horde fed and clothed. But it had been, by far, the most satisfying time of his life.

“Lost in thought again, doctor?”

Iruka peered over his patient notes to look at Kakashi, lounging on the cushioned seat set into the bay windows, a long finger keeping place in the filthy novel he was reading. In light sweats and one of Iruka’s faded Ramones t-shirts, his tattoo poking out from beneath the sleeve, he could have been one of the misfits himself. It was hard to imagine the straight-backed man in uniform in these quiet, relaxed moments.

“No, no. Just thinking.”

“About?”

The man had all but moved in, the better to watch the kids, to chase them off the roof when they scurried up to smoke pot, to talk them down when they were tense and anxious and hopeless about the future, to give them a rare but effective kind word, the plane of his rough hands a balm on their heads and shoulders and sometimes their tear-streaked cheeks.

“I was just thinking about how much I’m going to miss this,” Iruka said. He gazed wistfully out the window, where he could see Naruto and Sasuke in the porch swing, talking close, conspiratorial, Naruto coy, and Sasuke flushed and diffident, the typical Uchiha reaction to any and all intimacy.The early evening light painted them in soft shades of pink and gold.

“It may take longer than you think for your little ducklings to leave the nest,” Kakashi said, eyes drifting lazily to the towering sycamore in the yard. One of Gaara’s legs hung down between the leaves from the thick bough he’d claimed (and defended) as ‘his spot.’

“I think they really like it here.”

“Kakashi,” Iruka said, voice hushed. “Whatever happens in the coming weeks is bound to change something. These kids have seen a lot. They’ve been through a lot. And we’re asking them to take on more. To risk their lives and expose themselves to more death and more suffering. Something will change.”

Kakashi slowly turned his eyes to Iruka. His gaze was clear and piercing, his mouth firm.

“You’re right. They’ve seen a lot, these young men and women. But they aren’t children, and they haven’t been for a long time. They’re people who have walked through one level of hell or another and come out the other side. They’ve seen the worst that life has to offer and they still find a reason to go on. They’re stronger than you give them credit for.”

Iruka laid his papers down and swallowed. Kakashi had never turned that steel intensity on him before. It was humbling.

“Whatever damages we suffer when we take on the Akatsuki, they’ll heal from. They will change—but more importantly, they’ll grow. Wasn’t it you who said that giving them agency would help them move from victimhood to independence?”

“When I said agency, I wasn’t exactly talking about turning them into soldiers.”

“They’re fighting for their friends and for their city. For their own autonomy. They want this, Iruka. You’d do well to have faith in them.”

Iruka held Kakashi’s gaze and gave a slight nod. There was an overlong moment of frigid consideration before Kakshi melted back to his customary disaffectedness.

“Heyyy, doc,” came a saccharine voice from the kitchen.

Iruka looked up to see Sakura in her tight red yoga pants, slipping into the living room with Iruka’s finest bottle of scotch. Ino and Temari followed close behind with arms full of glasses.

“Guess what, doc,” Sakura said as she dumped herself into Iruka’s lap.

“Inappropriate, young lady,” Iruka said, gently pushing her off. She gripped his hand and squeezed with an uncanny strength.

“Come on, you old queen,” Ino said. “It’s a special occasion.”

“Yeah, doc, take a guess,” Temari said, pulling a sheaf of folded papers from her bra. “Here’s a raging clue.”

Iruka took the papers and carefully flattened them out. He held the letter high in front of his face as he began to read, but his excitement at the contents made him nearly drop the packet. He was skimming by the end, eyes darting over the details. He flipped through to the page that outlined the scholarship—substantial.

“Sakura,” he breathed, smiling wide and goofy. “This is excellent. Excellent.”

“NYU,” she said, dancing from foot to foot. “I’m gonna be a doctor.”

“Ain’t that some shit,” Temari said, neatly arranging the glasses on the coffee table nearby.

“It’s—this is just the first step, you know. It’s going to be a lot of work, Sakura, but still. This is wonderful news,” Iruka said, squeezing her hand tight.

“I’d say that’s a fair cause for celebration,” Kakashi said, moving to take the bottle of gold label whiskey from Sakura’s other hand.

“Someone call the boys in,” Ino said. “We’re getting drunk.”

“Dad’s drunk again?” Kiba said as he pulled girlfriend through the back kitchen door and into the living room.

“O-oh, hi, doctor Iruka.”

“Hello, Hinata.”

“Hey losers!” Temari yelled through the front window. “Get your tight asses in here, we’re having a toast.”

Naruto came in laughing, arm slung around Gaara’s shoulder. Sasuke followed close behind, scanning the room with interest.

“Bro, are you for real?” Naruto said. “Basketweaving?”

“It’s relaxing,” Gaara said archly, looking torn between smacking Naruto’s arm off and looping his own around the blonde’s waist.

“Oh hi Hinata. Kiba, you dog-faced motherfucker, how you locked down such a babe I’ll never know.”

Hinata blushed and gave a shy wave.

“Moron. You of all people should be able to appreciate my masculine charms,” Kiba said, lifting his shirt to expose his rippling abs.

“Put that away,” Sasuke said with distaste.

Kankuro trudged down the stairs, Shikamaru close behind.

“Who won?” Temari said, looking up at them.

“Why do you even ask anymore?” Kankuro said with a groan.

“Woah, the good stuff,” Shikamaru said, watching with the vaguest interest as Kakashi poured a finger of scotch into each mismatched cup. “What’s the occasion?”

“Sakura’s gonna be a doctor,” Ino said.

“You got in?” Naruto beamed. “Fuck yes!”

“With scholarship,” Sakura said, dusting off her shoulders with a confident smirk.

“Not bad,” Sasuke said, claiming a central seat on the couch.

Naruto perched himself on the back of the couch behind Sasuke. Gaara took the seat to Sasuke’s left, Ino to his right. Temari plopped down on the floor next to Shikamaru, and Kiba stood behind them with his arms around Hinata, chin on her shoulder.

“To the best proctologist the world has ever seen,” Kankuro said, taking a cup from Kakashi.

“Gynecologist, moron,” Kiba said, waving toward Ino.

Iruka chuckled and doled out the rest of the cups.

“To our girl,” Temari said, sniffing.

“To one of us getting the fuck out the neighborhood,” Shikamaru grumbled. “Even though it sounds like it’s gonna be a real A-class pain.”

“To my sweet tender baby angel,” Naruto said, blowing a kiss. “Don’t forget about your boy when you’re a hot shot anaesthesologist—”

“Anesthesiologist,” Sasuke corrected tersely.

“—making a million bucks and wanna make some cute blonde babies with a turkey baster, unless by then you finally come around to—”

“To your big fat head, you smart bitch,” Ino cut in, her blue eyes dancing. “May it fit all the information you learn forevermore.”

“To the next phase,” Kakashi said, lifting his glass. “To perseverance and to strength. You can do it, Sakura.”

“To life,” Iruka said, sweeping his eyes over each of his fugitive wards. “To a life beyond the one you know now.”

“Amen, doc,” Naruto said.

“Right on,” Temari said, lifting her glass.

The group clinked glasses and drank. Some (Naruto and Shikamaru and Kiba) threw the liquor back with puckered lips and satisfied hisses, others (Gaara and Sasuke and Kakashi) nursed their cups with a delicate reverence. Only the girls, the biggest drinkers in the house, went back for more, polishing off the rest of the bottle as they toasted Sakura’s various vices and virtues.

The din of the little celebration was cut by the tripping roar of a motorcycle as it pulled into the drive out front. Ten faces crowded the front window as two sleek, black-clad riders dismounted.

“It’s Itachi,” Kakashi said, putting down his glass.

At the name, spines straightened. Itachi visited the house on the inlet only a handful of times, but the mystery that had built up around him preceded him whenever he did.

“Looks like a party,” Shisui said as he shrugged out of his leather jacket in the entryway.

“Congratulations, Sakura,” Itachi said with a warm smile.

The group traded nervous glances, none of them quite brave enough to ask the man how he knew.

“Thank you,” Sakura said, cheeks flushed, just disinhibited enough to gawk openly and with no little hunger at the way the Gore-Tex pants and jacket clung to Itachi’s lean frame.

“Well,” Iruka said, picking up the empty bottle. “I’ve got another of these in the pantry. Why don’t you all go out back and start the grill, it’s almost dinner time.”

Shikamaru was the first to nod, jerking his head toward the kitchen. Slowly, the group followed, making its way past Itachi and out of the living room.

“Not you,” Kakashi said, clasping Sasuke’s shoulder. A nod to Naruto and both boys sat back down on the couch, Shisui between them.

“Six weeks,” Itachi said. “Akatsuki meets on the full moon after the equinox. I want Naruto, Sasuke and Gaara inside for the dispatch of the captains and their guards.”

“Copy,” Naruto said.

“I want Shikamaru, Kankuro, and Temari on arson and demolition.”

“They’ll be glad to hear that,” Shisui said.

“We’ll have Kiba work the perimeter with Sakura and Ino. They’re our first point of contact when law enforcement shows.”

“Sakura will be in classes by then,” Naruto said. “But Hinata can take her place.”

“That’s acceptable. I’ll rehearse a story with them,” Kakashi said.

“Shisui, I need you to handle the extractions. It’s our team plus Sasuke’s men on the inside.”

“I’ll handle it.”

“I want Iruka on call for any injuries and to debrief anyone who shows signs of shock.”

“I’ll clear my schedule,” Iruka said, entering from the kitchen with a dishtowel over his arm.

“Now, to the details,” Itachi said. “We have particular recourse to prepare our attack using the architecture of the location. I’ll acquire floor plans of the estate for all of you to review and have them sent over tomorrow.”

“Where is it being held?” Sasuke said.

“We meet this year in the Hamptons,” Itachi said, the ghost of a smile playing at one side of his mouth. “At my home.”


	7. Something Lost, Something Gained

Iruka took the team on vacation at the end of August, a reward for all the grueling work they’d put into preparations for the strike. He brought them to a little campground upstate on Itachi’s dime, a lush, cool forest thick with green and the sounds of birds and frogs and great orchestras of trilling insects. The space had five lean-tos in a circle around a big fire pit, a cabin to set into the woods on one side and outhouses down a short trail on the other. 

Kakashi took the crew on a long hike through the mountain trails, up and up till they broke for lunch at the summit. Naruto took the front on the way down, and the others, in the thrall of his bright example, shed their sneakers and shirts and shorts in pieces until, in various states of undress, they jumped into the river that cut through the thick green. By evening they were slumped in twos and threes around the crackling firepit, pleasantly worn out, sun kissed and eyes half-lidded.

“Never have I ever…hmm,” Sakura said.

She sat perched on a log, legs crossed, peeling and sectioning a pile of clementines from her lap.

“Never have I ever been arrested.”

Naruto, Kiba, Kankuro and Temari all put down a finger.

“Sakura, you dumb bitch,” Ino huffed. “You jinxed it. You better unjinx yourself before we go out again.”

“I told you, miss piggy, I’m retired while I’m in school.”

Sakura doled out the slices, and by a game of telephone the pieces rounded the circle. Naruto sat in the dirt, his back against Sakura’s log.

“Temari, go,” Naruto said. “Make it count.”

“Never have I ever,” Temari said, casting a sly glance around the fire, “done butt stuff…and liked it.”

Hinata and Sakura put a finger down. Kiba snorted a sip of his beer and looked sheepishly at his feet.

“Y’all are nasty,” Shikamaru said, laying back against a log.

“Ok, ok,” Naruto said. “My turn. Never have I ever gotten a blow job, believe it or not.”

“Ooh, really?” Hinata said with interest.

All the boys put a finger down, except Sasuke and Gaara.

“You paragons of virtue,” Lee said, sounding sincere. “I hope the goddess of love blesses you before your youth fades.”

“Shut up, Lee, you’re drunk,” Sakura said. She passed around another several slices of orange.

“It’s Sasuke’s turn,” Kiba said.

Sasuke stood apart from the others, a birch branch in his hand. He squatted to poke and fan the fire as it dwindled.

“Pass.”

“Hm,” Gaara said, eyes sweeping the circle. “Never have I ever been in love.”

Naruto put his finger down.

The group turned to look at him, expectant. It was the rule: if you were alone in admitting to something, you had to tell the story.

“What?” he said, crossing his arms defensively. “Nobody here ever felt like, y’know, really strong about someone before?”

He looked expectantly at Sakura.

“I don’t know. I thought I did, once. I don’t know though,” she said.

“Hinata? No one? Ino?”

“That’s so, so personal, to ask that,” Hinata said quietly.

“I’ve like, loved fucking people,” Ino said, smiling at Sakura. “But like, being in love? That’s different.”

Sasuke shoved at the dying embers with a stick, sending a burst of tiny sparks up with the smoke.

“Well?” Neji said. “What happened?”

Naruto smiled, and though it bent his whiskers, it didn’t meet his eyes.

“Nothing happened. Lame story, I know. Moving on.”

On Sasuke’s indication, Gaara stacked a careful pyramid of logs over the coals. He stepped back to let Sasuke tease the glow into great licking tongues of flame.

“Never have I ever…” Shikamaru began.

Gaara jerked his head and Sasuke followed him to just outside the circle. They stood, imperious and both a little peeved by force of habit, and for a few quiet minutes, they watched the flames rage, oblivious to the others and their game. They were Eros and Anteros, shoulder-to-shoulder in bas-relief on the slab of the dark, patina-bronzed by the glow of the fire.

Finally, Gaara said, “He won’t wait for you forever.” Quietly, privately, in that way he had of talking to you and only you.

Sasuke frowned. The pair gazed across the circle at Naruto, whose head was lolled back next to Sakura’s thigh as she absently stroked his shaggy blonde hair. He looked soft and undone in the firelight, fragile, a gentle sadness in the bend of his body. Sasuke felt a twist low in his guts.

“He would,” he said. “That’s the problem.”

Gaara regarded him coolly. Sasuke’s face was blank, smooth, but his eyes were stormy with pain.

“I’ll say this because he’s important to me. Give him what he deserves, or someone else will.”

Sasuke frowned, looked at Gaara sidelong.

“You can’t give what you don’t have,” he said.

Gaara folded his arms. Swept his sea-green eyes straight ahead as though it pained him to look at Sasuke any longer.

“Can’t, or refuse to try?”

Sasuke glared at the flames.

“I have bigger things to worry about right now.”

“Hm. Then you’re even weaker than I thought you were.”

The branch snapped in Sasuke’s fist. He dropped the splintered pieces and walked out of the circle of warmth, off into the dark where he wouldn’t be tempted to put his fist through someone’s chest.

Naruto looked up and met Gaara’s eyes over the flames. Gaara jerked his chin toward Sasuke’s retreating back, and Naruto jumped to follow.

“Hey, bastard, wait up.”

The trail faded into the underbrush, and Naruto stumbled after the sounds of Sasuke’s feet.

“What was it this time, you sensitive bitch? Who hurt you?“

“Not now, usuratonkachi.”

Naruto could barely make out the shape of Sasuke’s body in the speckled moonlight that slipped through the canopy. Something took hold at the base of his spine, something primal and electric with fear. How many times had he watched Sasuke run?

“C’mon, Sas, don’t be like this. We’re supposed to be building teamwork, y’know.”

It was just like that night they split all over again. Them in the dark, and the world with its back turned, and Sasuke running running running until he was gone. And the world closing in around Naruto, sirens and the choppy whump of helicopter blades and the clap of patrolmens’ boots like the countdown to a midnight that could ruin him. And feeling ruined already, because Sasuke was already gone. Because Sasuke had a reason to move on, something bigger than going all-city, bigger than being seen, than being up, than being acknowledged as the best. Sasuke had better things to do than be king of the five boroughs.

But Naruto didn’t.

“You’re gonna get us lost, asshole. Is that what you want?”

All Naruto had was Sasuke. Even now that he had the house on the inlet and Iruka and Kakashi and Shisui, and Itachi’s rare regard, even though he had a claim to the kingdom with his name finally running in all boroughs and across Jersey and Philly and Baltimore, even though he was known now wherever he went, with allies wherever he went, even though he unified beefing crews and talked people down from scrapping who’d been on sight for years, what did it all give him in the end but a creeping sense that none of these people would have looked at him twice if he wasn’t KURAMA.

But Sasuke looked. Sasuke saw him from the start. Sasuke was there and they were alone together when Naruto was a fresh toy, a nobody with no style and no ups and no connections and no family, when he had to rack just to have something to eat, let alone something to paint with. Sasuke was there before there even was a KURAMA, before Naruto was anything but a dumb kid from the neighborhood who played the fool to make people laugh, because at least then he could control what they were laughing about.

“You can’t shake me, teme. I’m not gonna let you run away like this.”

Sasuke was there when he became KURAMA, when he dragged himself up from dead last loser to someone worth noticing, something more than just a meaningless echo in the void.

He was the first good thing Naruto ever had, and the only person in the world who got it, who got the one beneath the name. The sadness and the loneliness and the desperation to be seen, the horrible truth and the dream big enough to eclipse it, the weakness and the desire to overcome it so strong that nothing can make it stop.

“Sasuke?”

Sasuke was so much of the reason that Naruto was KURAMA that losing him was inconceivable, more debilitating than the loss of a limb. The thought made Naruto’s breath come shallow and quick.

“Please. Please don’t run away.”

They were deep into the woods when Sasuke stopped. He braced himself against a tree trunk, fists up around his ears, forehead pressed to the cool bark. The angry trembling of his shoulders was barely visible in the beams of moonlight that speared the clearing.

“Please. Come back.”

“Leave me alone,” he said.

“No,” Naruto said, planting his feet wide. “And. Don’t order me around.”

Sasuke’s mind reeled. He was anxious, dizzy with the butterflies in his stomach, full near bursting with an incomprehensible sentiment. Gaara was right, he was weak, weak about Naruto, and something had to change.

“I’m not fucking around anymore. Go back to your friends—”

“‘Your friends,’ not ‘our friends.’ Nice,” Naruto said, edging close. “Guess you’re still too good for us, huh?”

“Don’t talk about things you don’t understand, loser.”

“I don’t understand? I understand you better than you think. You’re blinded by your own stupid fantasy that you can do this all alone.”

“Leave me alone. I want to be alone.”

“No. I can’t. I won’t.”

Sasuke turned around, leaning back against the tree. His whole body was trembling with the weight of a million withholdings, years and years of careful packing and stowing in a deep dark well. But now the well was fit to overflow—Sasuke could feel it trying to burst out from behind his eyes.

“You have everything you ever asked for,” he spat. “You’ve got a hundred friends and two dads and a million people you could date. Everybody fucks with you, you’re—you’re everyone’s golden boy. What more do you want?”

Naruto frowned. He edged himself into Sasuke’s personal space and crossed his arms.

“I want you to stop being a fucking baby,” he said. “I want you to give us all a chance. To let us in or something. For fuck’s sake, Sasuke, we’re all about to go to war for you. It’s not just me. It’s the whole crew, Sakura and Shika and Gaara and Kakashi and Iruka too and everyone. We—I want you to be free of this thing that’s eating you. I want you to be happy.”

“Happy? You want me to be happy?” Sasuke seethed, baring his teeth. “Bring my family back. Can you do that? Well?”

Naruto ducked his head.

“I can’t bring them back. But I just. Maybe, I thought somehow I could, y’know. Be family for you.”

Naruto stared down at his feet, dark lashes screening ice blue eyes.

“Cause like. That’s what you are for me, Sas’ke.”

Sasuke stared, eyes wide and searching. Something caught hot in the back of his throat.

“You’re my first family. I can’t let you go. I just can’t.”

“I don’t have anything good for you, Naruto. I don’t have what you need. You think you want me, but I’m just gonna keep fucking you over every time. I hate it about myself but it’s true. Sooner or later you’re gonna have to accept that.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Naruto said, raising his fists. “But I got what _you_ need right here.”

“I’ll show you what I fucking need,” Sasuke spat, bringing up his own.

Naruto swung for Sasuke’s ear, and when he moved to block, Naruto feinted, dipped and wove under his guard and came up between Sasuke’s arms. Backed against the tree with Naruto’s knee blocking his open flank, Sasuke couldn’t weave away. He pinched his eyes shut, bracing for one of Naruto’s trademark headbutts.

What came instead hit him just as hard.

Naruto’s hands swept warm and firm up the sides of Sasuke’s neck, feeling in the dark till they slid into the hair that fell around his face. Naruto’s lips were warm and dry and a little chapped, but his tongue was hot and wet and citrus-sweet when he swiped into Sasuke’s mouth, sucking a gasp from the heat with a thirsty, open-mouthed kiss.

They parted with a jolt, panting nervous-shallow and feverwarm in the cool mountain air.

“Well? You ready to stop being a dickhead? I know that’s kinda your thing, but—”

“Why?” Sasuke whispered, eyes wide. “Why are you like this?”

Naruto fidgeted. Closed in on himself, suddenly doubtful.

“What do you mean ‘why’—”

“Why me?”

Naruto smiled and reached for Sasuke’s left hand with his right, clasping loose around the wrist.

“Man, you been calling me dumb since we were twelve years old. But if you still don’t understand why, you’re a bigger moron than I ever was.”

Sasuke jerked his hand, but Naruto held on, pressing closer.

“When I say I’m in for you, I mean all in,” he whispered, dropping his forehead against the tree trunk. They were cheek-to-cheek, almost close enough to feel each other's tripping heartbeats. “It’s you. It was only ever you. Can’t do nothin about it.”

It hit Sasuke then, every word Iruka had dripped into his brain: self-care, self-work, self-worth, work, worth, worthy. The shock of the thought that he could be worthy—that he could be loved—shot through him like lightning. For a split second he saw himself as though through Naruto’s piercing blue eyes. He felt a cloying warmth surge up from behind his belly button.

“I thought maybe I could change, y’know. Not feel that way or something. It’s impossible,” Naruto said as he started to pull away. “I just want you to be happy. Not lonely, not sad. I don’t want you to hurt, I. I can’t stand that. You’re my friend—my best friend. At least let me be that for you.”

Sasuke’s hand twitched in Naruto’s grasp, twisting, shifting down, and Naruto stepped back, putting space between them once more.

“It’s okay, y’know. If you don’t feel anything more than that. But you can’t do this alone. At least let me be a fr—”

“ _Naruto_ ,” Sasuke said, low, dark, and Naruto winced, moved to jerk away. But Sasuke’s fingers slotted between his and gripped tight, and held fast, and drew him in slowly.

“Just shut _up_ for once.”

Naruto was quiescent, rigid, tingling with nerves as Sasuke pressed in, whittling down the distance between them.

“ _Make_ me.”

Like a thunderclap, like rain ripped from dark skies split neon blue with heat lightning, Sasuke finally broke.

* 

They wound their way back to the campsite in the pre-dawn haze, clothes rumpled and leaves in their hair. The soft sounds of sleep from the lean-tos was cut by the warbling of a thrush, high syncopated melody that raised at the end like a question.

Their warm, misty smiles faded by degrees as they approached the remnants of the fire. A dark figure, gaunt and hunched as though in pain, stood on shaky legs before the coals.

“Cap? S’that you?”

“Thank god you’re back,” Kakashi said, wringing his hands.

“Shit, cap,” Naruto said. “We didn’t mean to worry you. Were you up all night waiting?”

Sasuke’s eyes darted from the long shadows under Kakashi’s eyes to the nervous twitching of his little finger as he gripped at his phone.

“What happened?” Sasuke said.

“I really think we should all sit down.”

“Cap?”

Kakashi slid his phone into his back pocket and scrubbed his hands over his face. He covered his mouth with one big palm for two deep breaths in.

“What happened?” Sasuke said.

Kakashi looked to Naruto, who pressed up against Sasuke’s shoulder with his own.

“What happened, Kakashi?”

Softly so that it stayed between them, but clear enough that they could understand, Kakashi said,

“Shisui died.”


	8. The Answer

For three long days after Shisui was murdered, training lapsed. There was sulking and storming off and a few suspiciously fist-shaped holes in the drywall of the house on the inlet. Then Iruka took one long look at Itachi’s blank eyes and ordered everyone over to the estate to fill the lonely halls with their profanity and their flickering light. It was for operations as much as for healing—the strike was days away, and they had drills to run.

Shikamaru had them tightly scheduled and back on their meal plans after a quick stop at an office supply for a whiteboard and a supermarket run that took Lee and Neji both to load and unload from the back of Shisui’s old Jeep. There was a snappiness in the way they moved and ate and slept, tight and efficient, and the estate with its lavish furniture and lush gardens took on a bellicose air. 

Sasuke plied himself to the hanging bag in the basement gym, kicking and punching until his knuckles split. He wrapped his fingers and wailed until the wrap split, then wrapped again and went until the bag split. Naruto, for his part, did circuits of burpees and pull-ups and dead lifts until his palms split and the sheer bulk of his body tore the pull-up bar off the doorframe. 

It was Gaara who first picked a path through the woods behind the property. He ran and ran until the brambles ripped his socks and tore at his ankles and the high tops on his white all-stars ran pink with sweat and blood.

It was through those woods that Naruto and Sasuke ran tonight, bounding over knotted roots, swerving under and around thick tree limbs, feet sucking down into the damp earth. In the night before the strike, only Naruto and Sasuke left the tense circle of the strategy meeting to go run in the last of the daylight.

“Man, I’m,” Naruto said, panting, “I’m freakin bout all this.”

Sasuke ran smooth and easy, breathing in deep through his nose and out through his mouth.

“You’ve never been scared to square up before. What’s so different now, usuratonkachi?”

Naruto grabbed a low-hanging bough and used it to swing himself over a fallen log.

“It’s just,” he said, swiping at the sweat on his lip, “I ain’t never killed anyone before, y’know.”

Sasuke slowed as they rounded a bend in the deer trail that brought them to the creek that split the path. Naruto skidded to a stop next to him when they reached the bank.

“I feel like we could get lost in it, is all,” he said, leaning down on his knees as he caught his breath. “I don’t want to get lost.”

Sasuke stared at the foamy rush of water and tried not to think of Shisui and failed. He tried not to think of his mother and failed even worse.

“I have to do this,” he said. “I have to finish this.”

“I know, man,” Naruto said, straightening up next to Sasuke. He reached out and looped their pinkies together. “I’m with you. Just. Let’s be good about it. If we’re gonna end this, let’s really end it. Clean cuts. No more hate. No more vengeance.”

Sasuke stared down at his empty right hand and imagined crushing the windpipe of the man who murdered his mother.

“I don’t know what I’ll do when I see him. The one who killed my family.”

“Whatever you do, man, you’re still you.”

“I don’t know if I’ll be able to stop.”

“Then I’ll stop you. I’ll bring you back. I always do.”

Sasuke squinted through the trees, looking for the shape of the estate in the distance.

“You think life can go ever back to the way it was, after we do it?”

Naruto snorted.

"Fuck no.”

Sasuke stared at his hands. He balled and unballed his fists, testing the growing strength there.

“But maybe that’s all right, y’know? Maybe that’s a good thing. You keep moving forward. That’s all you can do, Sasuke. One foot in front of the other.”

“Hm.”

Left foot forward, Sasuke stepped down into the creek. Naruto was quick to follow.

*

Thin and hungerless. Quick to anger, and just as quick to lapse into a soft, distant silence into which no words could pass. Sleepless but bone tired, with a pinch under the eyes, a sallow cast to the pale olive skin. More vicious than normal, sharp-tongued and scrappy over anything. Intent and often obsessive regarding things adjacent to the loss. The depth of sadness both felt and expressed as rage. This was the shape of grief on an Uchiha.

“So we set the scanner to this channel,” Shikamaru said, fidgeting with the radio box on the island in the expansive kitchen in Itachi’s estate. “And we listen and wait for last call.”

And Naruto knew that shape well enough. He had years to absorb Sasuke’s pain when it flowed out through his eyes and the quick, angry movements of his hands. It was easy to read the same pain in the tight line of Itachi’s mouth and the inconsolable sadness that washed over his normally inexpressive face when he combed his hair. There was no depressive stupor. Itachi was, if anything, even more functional than normal. 

“How will we know it’s for him?” Temari said.

“We’ll know,” Kankuro said. “We’ll know.”

Naruto gazed out into the dining room. The big French doors were open on the garden and the yard beyond. Itachi’s dark silhouette sat against the trunk of the weeping willow tree.

“It’s no good,” Hinata said. “Him being all alone like that.”

“He’ll wanna hear it,” Shikamaru said. “I promise you that.”

Naruto took a seat with the guys, who had laid out all their guns on the kitchen island and were passing around rags and brushes and little bottles of oil, servicing the serviceable weapons just to have something to do to occupy their heavy minds. 

“Leave him be,” Sasuke said. “He’s in a mood.”

Temari elbowed Sakura and leaned in to whisper in her ear.

“He’s being a baby. Don’t let him sulk all alone out there.”

Sakura made careful eye contact with Ino and Hinata. The three brushed past Temari, out the dining room and into the garden.

“Hi, Itachi,” Sakura said, kneeling down next to him.

“Sakura. Ladies.”

“What are you doing out here?” Hinata said, fidgeting with her hands behind her back.

“I’m planning.”

Ino brushed her bangs from her face and gentled her voice.

“Let us help you. What are we planning?”

Itachi squinted up at them, eyes glassy and unfocused.

“Something to welcome our guests next week,” he said. “Perhaps a bouquet.”

“I think that’s a great idea,” Ino said. “I’ve seen your garden.”

They reached out to him. Itachi took Sakura’s small hand in his right and Hinata’s in his left, and the girls pulled him up to standing. Ino stood behind, her slim right hand in the hollow between his shoulder blades. They ushered him over to the garden, a lovely, deadly thing Shisui helped him plant the spring before. ‘They remind me of you,’ Shisui had said, pointing out the oleander and fox glove and water hemlock, ‘nice to look at and quick to kill.’

“He had an eye for flowers,” Itachi said quietly. “Like you, Ino.”

Hinata untied the purple bandana from around her neck and spread it on the walkway. Ino pointed at a delicate bunch of thin-leaved white buds.

“Lily of the valley,” Ino said. “Take the leaves, not the blossoms. And Sakura, cut the foxglove from the top, not the stalk.”

The girls worked carefully, gingerly, pinching off buds and leaves and dropping them onto the bandana. 

“Take the root from those,” Itachi said. “The root’s more potent.”

Hinata nodded, then stuck the little cluster of water hemlock she’d just picked behind her ear.

“And just a few of those will do, Sakura.”

“Okay,” Sakura said as she tugged carefully at a fist-sized knot of hydrangea blooms.

“And the centerpiece?” Ino said.

Itachi reached for the pointed white flowers of the jimsonweed that grew thick along the south side of the house. In the early evening chill, the slender trumpet-shaped blossoms were just beginning to unfold. 

“Well, now. I think that’s a proper collection to present to our guests, ladies. Don’t you?” he said, cocking his head.

Ino gathered up the corners of the bandana. Sakura helped Hinata to her feet and they brushed the earth from one another’s pants. They turned their red-rimmed, hard-edged eyes to him. 

“Lovely. Now let’s go put the kettle on.”

They walked back to the kitchen in silence. Inside, the boys were camped around the radio, ears trained to the crackling patter of the dispatcher as they tended the weapons Shisui trained them with.

“Do we have more rags?” Sasuke asked, running a cleaning rod through the bore of a rifle.

“I’ll get some,” Gaara said, slotting the cylinder closed on his revolver.

Finally, a familiar voice signed on.

_ “Dispatch to U0725, that’s Sam Union oh-725 _ .”

Temari filled a stock pot with water.

_ “No answer U0725.” _

Itachi took a seat in the middle of the circle of young men, an armory’s worth of sparkling steel and sleek carbon fiber laid out between them. He ran his fingers over Shisui’s Glock and felt a knot tighten choking-thick in his throat.

_ “Union 0725 is out of service. Detective Shisui Uchiha answered his final call Saturday night at 22:00 hours while investigating a major narcotics ring. He was killed in the line of duty by two point-blank gunshot wounds to the head.”  _

The girls crushed the flowers in their fists and sprinkled them into the simmering water.

_ “His sacrifice was one of many made for the safety of this city and its people. His service and dedication to the force of right will not be forgotten. Officer Uchiha, badge number 0725, is 10-42. _

If there were tears (and there were) no one made notice.

_ “Rest in power, Shisui. We will not let your sacrifice go unanswered.” _

A strange sense of unity had knit them tight together. All the squabbling and the lingering tension was replaced with a shared righteousness. They were at last a cohesive force, allied by their pain, honed on their collective loss. 

“Soon,” Itachi said. “Soon, we get our answer.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is late and was supposed to have another part, making it twice as long! But I had to work late so it’ll go up tomorrow! Thanks for your patience everyone. <3 and thank you for reading.


	9. Lightning Strikes Twice

Itachi was the benefactor of a large number of charities. His government salary, substantial, paled in comparison to what he took in from organized crime. The tax shelter of a non-profit was one of the many ways in which he washed his wealth. That the Akatsuki left it to his discretion to fabricate the charities, well. He took joy in creating organizations that served to both functionally improve communities and launder substantial quantities of cash. Soup kitchens, teaching clinics, adult ed, subsidized childcare. The list was extensive. If he could reward those close to him in the process, it was all a happy confluence. 

Tonight they toasted to the bright new futures of seven rough young men, scrubbed clean and dressed for the occasion by Itachi’s _Helping Handstyles_. H2 was an organization dedicated to rehabilitating low-income neighborhoods by paying local youths to buff the facades of graffiti. Seven such exemplary youths found themselves the recipients of a grant that covered their expenses as they pursued their GEDs or trade school.

It was, by outside accounts, a charity dinner, a way to explain away to the neighborhood and local law enforcement the line of expensive cars with out-of-state plates that filled the long driveway of Itachi’s estate. But on the inside, to Naruto, to Sasuke, to Itachi deep in mourning, it was war.

Itachi was wearing the suit Nagato sent him when he made capo: close-tailored black silk with blood red pinstripe over a black shirt and skinny, blood red tie. He wore his garnet pinky ring, his gold watch. In truth, he loathed the suit, and was glad to finally have an excuse to burn it.

“To our guests of honor and recipients of this year’s grants,” Itachi said, long fingers delicately pinching the slim stem of a champagne flute.

At Itachi’s side, Naruto squirmed. Itachi had personally dressed him for the gala in a dark charcoal gray suit with a burnt orange waistcoat. The suit was cut and tailored just so by Itachi’s seamstress that no matter what angle Naruto moved, the pistols strapped to his chest and the small of his back were invisible beneath the fabric.

“To those of you who believe in the dream of a world without avarice, where young men and women all over the nation have access to the resources they need and deserve.” 

He turned his sharp, dark eyes to senator Danzo. 

“And finally, to the benefactors whose generosity make it possible for us to bring the change to our community it so desperately needs.”

Itachi kissed the flute and lifted just enough to touch the liquid to his lips, a wicked smile closing his mouth to the fragranced liquid. 

Gaara swept the long table to see that all the targets drank. Orochimaru and his guard. Obito and his guest, a waspish man with two-toned hair. The senator and his willowy aide. Sasori, a high profile plastic surgeon with a booming oxy business. One of Nagato’s representatives in that compulsory, glaring red hair dye. All but Obito and the senator’s aide had drained their glasses. He made a discrete hand signal to Shikamaru beside him. Twenty minutes or so and they’d be good to go.

“I’m gonna go have a smoke,” Shikamaru said, rising from the table.

Kiba’s eyes danced. 

“Smoke sounds good.”

Naruto took the cue. He turned to the senator with a grin.

“You smoke too, gramps? I betcha got Cuban cigars back in DC. What’s that like?”

“‘Gramps’—how dare you, you brat,” Danzo said, narrowing his visible eye.

“Naruto,” Itachi chided, gently but not too gently. “Show some respect. This man is an elected servant of the citizens of this nation.”

On the other side of the table, Orochimaru erupted in dark laughter.

“The senator isn’t used to the common element. Harvard man and all.”

“All the more reason for us to hang with him,” Naruto said. “C’mon, senator gramps, you want a Newport?”

“You’ll have to excuse him, senator,” Itachi said, eyes trained on the clammy, purple-tinged flush of Danzo’s cheeks. “Unless you’d prefer to excuse yourself?”

“Sai, call the driver,” Danzo said. “The rest of this business doesn’t concern us anyway.”

“Right away, sir.”

Danzo stumbled to his feet. Naruto caught him by the elbow and tugged him toward the door. 

“I’ll walk ya out, senator gramps. You’re lookin kinda tired, y’know.”

The world took on a strange hue. Danzo was sure the window treatments were somehow melting down into the floor. He could barely look at his aide’s face without flinching at the troubling grimaces, impossible and clown-wide.

“So I been dying to ask you, gramps,” Naruto said as they crossed the foyer. “Cause like, I heard this rumor, and it’s a crazy rumor but I just gotta know.”

They approached the valet stand set up to the side of Itachi’s long driveway.

“Senator? Your car ticket?” Sasuke said.

Danzo patted at his pockets, hands trembling.

“So anyways yeah, did you put the hit out on Shisui?” Naruto said.

Danzo froze.

“Cause that’s what I heard.”

Sasuke slid his hand up the small of Naruto’s back, inching up the vest until he could grip at the pistol there.

“Funny,” he said. “I heard the same thing.”

“Time to settle up, gramps,” Naruto said, kicking at the back of Danzo’s knees. The senator hit the gravel driveway with a grunt.

“How,” he said, turning his visible eye to his aide. “Sai. Help me.”

“Goodness, senator,” Sai said, smiling that horrifying fox’s smile. “Who ever do you think tipped them off about that?”

Sasuke pressed the pistol to the back of Danzo’s head.

“So who called the hit?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Danzo said, voice faltering as his throat closed up, the poison finally taking hold. 

“Who called the hit, senator?”

Jugo pulled up in the senator’s town car. He handed the keys to Sai, who gave a cheery wave as he got in the front seat.

“It was a pleasure working under you, senator,” he said as he turned the engine over.

Sasuke cocked the gun.

“I asked you a question.”

“You…you’re the Uchiha boy, aren’t you,” Danzo said. “I can help you. I can change your life.”

“We’re all Uchiha tonight, bitch,” Naruto said.

Sasuke pulled the trigger. For one horrifying moment, the world froze.

He stared down at the gore that stuck in clumps between the stones of the gravel driveway. The light had left the senator’s visible eye, and what stared up at him above the gaping hole where the nose used to be could have been a marble, a river rock. One of those hard candies Naruto loved so much, the unappealing gray-brown of the chocolate flavor.

“We need to get him out back,” Jugo said. “They’re making the patio the epicenter.”

“Okay,” Naruto said, a little breathless. “Okay.”

Jugo took a limp arm and leg in his broad hands and lifted the lifeless body in a fireman’s hold. They moved around the bushes to the back of the house, where Sakura was bent over a prone body like a lover.

“It’s all gonna be okay, doctor. You wanna give in, don’t you?” she said, clutching his hand to her chest. She brushed his sweat-slick bangs off his forehead. “You’ve been hurting for a long time, haven’t you? It’s why you did all those awful things, right?”

Naruto shivered. Kneeled down next to the writhing, sputtering Sasori, Sakura was a black widow, her gentle caresses spinning silk as the young doctor foamed at the mouth.

“It’s time to give in, okay? You can go into the light. You don’t have to hurt anymore.”

Jugo threw Danzo’s body down next to Sasori right as the doctor went limp, the front of his expensive red slacks soaking through with piss.

Kankuro lurched out of the dining room, dragging a limp body by the ankles. 

“Fucked this one up good,” he said, dropping Zetsu’s legs with a whump. The face beneath the two-toned hair was a pulpy mess. “Can’t tell if he’s done or not. Someone cap him, will ya?”

Shikamaru bent over the body, wrinkling his nose.

“Ugh, this sucks,” he said, sliding his hands up under the lolling head. He nudged his knee under Zetsu’s shoulders and gripped at the hair, one color in each hand. He wrenched his arms and there was an audible snap as the neck gave.

“That’ll do it,” he said, wiping his hands off on the grass.

“Who else,” Sasuke said. “I need to know who’s left.”

Temari came out of the house with two bright red gas cans.

“Itachi’s inside with the last four,” she said. “Kakashi broke cover, he’s engaged. We need to tie this up ASAP.”

Naruto placed his hand on the back of Sasuke’s neck.

“Focus,” he said, running his thumb up under Sasuke’s ear. “Stay here, teme.”

Sasuke’s shoulders heaved as he breathed through clenched teeth.

“C’mon,” Naruto said, popping the buttons on his vest. He slipped out one of the handguns there and tugged Sasuke toward the double doors into the dining room. “Sooner this is over, the sooner we can live.”

“It’s chaos inside,” Shikamaru said, jogging up to them. “Explosives are set, we gotta make sure everyone’s out in the next fifteen.” 

They stepped up to the double doors in formation with Sasuke taking point. He flung one of the doors open and stepped inside, pistol raised. 

Gaara was looming over the thrashing body of Nagato’s man, face splattered with a bright slash of blood. His eyes were wide and his teeth white and flashing as he pinned the red haired man to the ground with a knee on his chest. He was all sinew and flex and plaited ropes of muscle bending drawn like a bow as he shot his fists one after the other across the delirious man’s jaw. 

“This is for that time the six of you jumped me in Santa Fe,” he said evenly. “Sleep now.” 

His hands wrapped tight around the tension-corded neck, and his teeth flashed in a mad grimace as he bore down. He slammed the man’s head down once, twice more before letting go, breathing ragged through his bared teeth.

Naruto pulled gently at Gaara’s shoulders, catching the shorter man with his chest as Gaara stumbled to standing.

“Few more,” Gaara said, voice flat as still water.

Further inside, Itachi had Kabuto’s arms wrenched behind his back and was using the man as a shield. Orochimaru, amber eyes mad and red at the edges, reached impotently for his handgun on the floor as he grunted through lockjaw-clenched teeth.

“Where’s your charm now, old friend?” Itachi said, forcing Kabuto forward as he shuffled closer. “Cat got your tongue?”

“Drugged me,” Kabuto slurred, head lolling back on Itachi’s shoulder.

“I did, I did,” Itachi said, tucking a stray lock of gray hair behind Kabuto’s ear. “How many have you drugged, hm? I’d wager the number is high in the thousands.”

Sasuke stepped up behind Itachi, gun trained on Orochimaru’s head. 

“Say bye bye, daddy,” Itachi whispered in Kabuto’s ear. 

“No, ss-stop…”

Kabuto bucked against the hold and winced, drool dripping down his chin. Orochimaru staggered to his feet, arms jerking as he overbalanced then righted himself. Sasuke cocked his pistol.

“Sssssaske,” he hissed through his stiff jaw. “Betraying me, f-for him—he mur-murd—ered your—”

But Sasuke wasn’t listening, he was feeling feeling feeling all the rage and the sadness and remembering all the overdoses and the broken lives and Shisui like a mantra Shisui Shisui Shisui and the punishments for insubordination, and his mother, his mother, and the people Orochimaru made an example of and the others he discarded like trash.

“This is for Kimimaro, you sick fuck,” he said, and Shisui’s voice in his ear said _deep breath in, good, eyes front, now breathe out and squeeze, slow, good, great job cuz, you’re doing great_. And Sasuke felt great. He felt like laughing, because Orochimaru was laughing, eyes wide and mouth gaping open, red and wet and he was shaking with laughter, vibrating with it, so deep it brought him down to his knees, to his face smashed with a wet squelch against the marble, and then Sasuke was laughing too, hysterical.

“Hey, hey,” Naruto said, warm hands over Sasuke’s cold ones. “Hey. Look at me. Where’s your head at, man?”

Naruto’s hands were on his arms and pushing the gun down and then up his shoulders and then cupping his cheeks and pulling their foreheads together, breathing deep, in and out, until Sasuke’s world bled back into focus and his heart slowed.

“There he is,” Naruto said with a smile. There was an incomprehensible warmth in the blue eyes and a softness in the full mouth and Sasuke hiccuped back a sob, because who could smile with the world burning but Naruto. Sasuke crashed against him, tucking into his neck and breathing in the warm familiar smell, and it cut the smell of gunpowder and gore and he felt the blood rush back to his hands.

“I gotcha, ya bastard. We’re almost home free.”

Itachi threw Kabuto to the ground, and the oleander essence in the champagne must have blossomed in his nervous system, because he jerked and spasmed and his eyes rolled back. Itachi kicked Kabuto hard in the ribs, flipping him half into the spreading puddle leaking out from what was left of Orochimaru’s jaw.

“Last solace,” he said. “Rot together in life, rot together in death.”

Something crashed and broke against the doorway to the foyer, and Kakashi stumbled back into the dining room, Obito close behind him. There was a tight scuffle and a groan and the echoing POP of a round going off, and then Obito was down, sprawled out in front of the dining table.

“Guess that’s finally it, old friend,” Kakashi said.

His shoulders heaved as he stepped back. He stared down at Obito’s body, still and silently weeping from his injured eye. He holstered his gun at his hip and knelt down next to check for a pulse.

“Kakashi,” Itachi said darkly. “Finish the job.”

Obito twitched. And Kakashi hesitated for a split second, caught between his training and the hope that an old friend survived. It was all the time it took for Obito to whip Kakashi’s gun out of the holster and point it right between his eyes.

“Help me up, Bakashi,” he said, grinning-wincing. “It’s the least you can do.”

Kakashi stepped back slowly, and Obito moved with him, gun trained on his head. When he finally stumbled upright, Obito tucked in, sliding close, pressing his bleeding stomach against Kakashi’s side and then his back, sliding the gun around until it pressed tight against Kakashi’s temple. 

“Obito,” Kakashi said.

“No. You don’t get to speak. You get to shut your traitor mouth,” Obito hissed, pressing the gun so tight it puckered the skin.

“Get the fuck away from him,” Sasuke hissed, gun raised.

“Well, well, well, if it isn’t the last Uchiha. I’d know you from a mile away, little cousin.”

Sasuke paled. 

“Obito,” Itachi said darkly, inching forward. 

Obito pushed the barrel of the gun at Kakashi’s temple. 

“I think it’s time you came all the way clean, ‘Tachi,” he said. “Oh wait, you’re a compulsive liar. You believe your own bullshit so hard you probably don’t even know the truth anymore. Fine. Why don’t I finally tell your precious little brother what’s what.”

Sasuke turned to Itachi.

“What is he talking about?”

“Sasuke,” Itachi said, eyes darting back and forth from Sasuke’s drawn face and Kakashi’s resigned, closed-eye frown. 

“You think he just fell into some bad shit, don’t you. I bet he gave you some sob story about your daddy trying to clean the town up. Fucking idiot,” Obito sneered.

“What’s he talkin bout, Itachi?” Naruto said, eyes locked on Kakashi, still and compliant in Obito’s grip.

“You know about the yakuza, you ignorant mook?” Obito said, hard eyes on Naruto. “That’s us. That’s the Uchiha.”

“That’s not,” Sasuke said, fists balling. “No, there were cops. Grandpa, and his dad back east, they were cops.”

“They were plants, you naive little thing. They were dirty.”

Obito looked Sasuke up and down.

“Why’d you go tag up the city? Hm? Why’d you find it so easy to slip up the ladder with that snake, hm?”

Sasuke dipped his head, shoulders trembling.

“Because it’s in your blood, kid. Your world is the underworld.”

Obito jerked Kakashi’s chin, gesturing with his handgun as he spoke.

“Uchiha. Uchiha Uchiha Uchiha. You know how many generations we been doing this, little cousin? You couldn’t even count em. It goes back to the old country, it goes back to the fucking opium trade, it’s silk and whores and drugs and weapons, first it was swords and then it was guns and now it’s cocaine, now it’s H, now it’s whatever’s clever because that’s who we are. That’s what we are.”

Obito seethed, the blood soaking through the front of his jacket. He hissed and hocked frothy pink spit at Itachi’s feet before turning his angry eyes back to Sasuke.

“This naive son of a bitch thought you were too good for what we are. He thought there’s something better than this, like his dad. Arrogant. Arrogant prick. Well let me tell you both, for us? For an Uchiha? There’s nothing better than this. This is your blood, it’s your birthright and your fucking destiny. So get with it, because when I’m gone, he’s next in line,” he said, jerking the gun at Itachi. “And then it’ll be you. And one of you fags better make a kid or two, because however bad you think this is, it’ll be worse without an Uchiha at the helm. It’ll be chaos.”

Sasuke turned to Itachi, an eerie stillness in his eyes.

“Is it true?”

"Sasuke, please…"

"Is it?"

Kakashi opened his bicolored eyes. He met Naruto’s gaze and held it.

“If you want the straight truth from one, you’re outta luck,” Obito said. “Nobody knows what game he’s playing. Not me, not you. Not your dad before he murdered him.”

Sasuke hissed in a breath.

“Wait, wait, wait,” Naruto said, stepping between Sasuke and Obito. “You can’t just say shit like that, like it’s true. Like it’s rule. Like there’s some kind of fucked up force controlling the universe making you all crazy. No. No. Don’t act like you didn’t choose this. Don’t act like you didn’t get caught up in your own shit, in your own pain. Act like it wasn’t your fault you did all the shit you did, that it was destiny. Fuck. That’s the dumbest shit I ever heard. You chose this. They chose this. So Itachi wanted to choose something else. So what.”

Obito stared at Naruto for a moment, face pinched with effort as though he was interpreting a foreign language. Then he laughed. He laughed with his head thrown back, full belly laugh. And while he was laughing, Kakashi made the hand signal that meant plan Z.

Naruto blinked. A year. It was a year of intense training, under Kakashi, under Shisui. Under Itachi, the sharpest marksman of them all. It was easy, too easy, to cock his gun and sweep it up and aim it just so, one long quick motion, and pull the trigger smooth and easy, it took just another blink, and the kickback was a gentle kiss that shook him like when Shisui would clap him on the back and shake him and say _good one, kid, good one._

The .50 caliber bullet tore viciously through Kakashi’s shoulder, through-and-through and through again to Obito’s heart. There was a sick sucking sound as Obito drowned on the wave of his own blood in his throat, and then there was nothing. Kakashi stumbled under the dead weight of Obito’s body, and the two crumpled to the floor like marionettes with their strings cut. 

“We want something different,” Naruto said, eyes damp and dim.

At the deafening noise of the large caliber discharge, Temari and Sakura had rushed in from the garden. 

“Fuck,” Temari said. “Fuck, fuck, fuck. He’s gonna bleed out.”

“I already called Iruka for Kankuro’s hand,” Sakura said, applying pressure to Kakashi’s shoulder. “He’s not. He’s not gonna bleed out. We’re not gonna let him.”

Kakashi groaned as Temari and Sakura shifted him to standing. 

“That’s it,” Gaara said as he propped Kakashi up with his shoulder. “That’s everyone down.”

“We’re done here. We have to get him out of here,” Sakura said. “We need to get him in the Jeep now. There’s coagulant in the Jeep. Temari, please.”

The girls braced Kakashi’s other side, and the four of them inched carefully toward the front door.

“There should be one more,” Sasuke said, eyes sweeping the chaos of the room. “Itachi, where is he? Which one killed our parents? Which one?”

Itachi brushed the hair from his face and took a careful step toward Sasuke.

“There is one more, little brother. Weren’t you listening?”

“No,” Sasuke said. “Itachi, no. You said we could kill him together. You said we would do it together.”

“I’m sorry, Sasuke,” Itachi said. He gripped the barrel of Shisui’s Glock and held it out to Sasuke, grip first. “You’re going to have to do this one alone.”

“No,” Sasuke said, voice breaking. “No.”

“Yes. Sasuke, yes. I wanted it to be you. It’s only right.”

Naruto stepped up to Sasuke’s side.

“Like fuck this is right,” he said.

“Why,” Sasuke rasped. “You—why?”

Itachi took another step forward. He gripped one of Sasuke’s trembling hands and brought it up to the butt of the gun. Naruto seethed.

“No,” he said, grabbing their wrists tight. “Fuck this and fuck acting cool and fuck you people with your, with your robot emotions and acting like you don’t even have them. No. Sasuke, bastard you listen to me, I don’t give a shit anymore, I’m telling you right now I’m gonna stand by you till the day you die or the day I do, and if you don’t believe that then fuck you. I’m gonna stand by you and I, I don’t wanna look in your eyes every night and see a pain I coulda prevented. No, fuck that. You’re gonna regret this, you’re like, you’re already regretting it I can see it on your face. So put the fucking gun down and the both of you come with me, or I swear to god I’ll beat you both half blind and drag you outta here myself. Don’t think I won’t do it.”

He squeezed hard, forcing their hands apart. Sasuke staggered back, staring down at his hands like he’d been burnt. Naruto took the glock from Itachi and tucked it into the back of his pants. Itachi fell to his knees, dazed and resigned. Naruto shook his head, the tears flowing free now, and he pushed through them to squint down at Itachi.

“And you. Fuck, you are so fucked up. You are so fucked up and you are so cool, you know that? I been on your shit since I was ten years old. I still remember first time I saw your piece, it was UCHIHA on the Williamsburg bridge and I thought, I thought what does that mean? Who is that? How is that even possible? You’re like, you’re the reason I write man, in a lot of ways it’s you. You’re not like most people. Lucky for us, cause like. Man could the world even take two of you? But fuck man you gotta get your head straight. Make your brother do that to you, are you insane? Do you wanna ruin his life? More than you already have man? Fuck out of here. Get up. I mean it, Itachi, get the fuck up. We got three minutes. C’mon, get up, we’re leaving.”

He jerked Itachi up by the wrist and tugged. He held out his right hand, chin high, eyes hard through the tears and waited until Sasuke took it, limp and clammy but he took it, and Naruto dragged them, the last Uchihas, out of the big lonely house that drugs bought for the last time.

Sakura was doing triage on Kakashi in the back of the Jeep, and Shikamaru was already in the driver’s seat, ready to go. Temari slipped in next to him and whistled loud with her fingers in her mouth, and Kiba came running from the side of the house.

“C’mon,” Naruto said, pushing the Uchihas toward Kakashi’s truck. Jugo was in the front seat with Gaara beside him, and Naruto opened the bed and pushed until both brothers climbed up, and he climbed up with them, and there was shouting and the glow of a fire from around back, and Itachi collapsed in on himself, head hanging between his bent knees, and there were checks and calls, and Sasuke’s hand held tighter, and then the caravan was off.

And Naruto watched the big estate get smaller by turns, and then there was a great boom, a crack and a shockwave, pressure and heat, and the billow of smoke and the blowback of debris and it was over, it was the beginning of over, the beginning of the end of the most fucked up, most spectacular time Naruto could remember.

And when Sasuke seemed to breathe again, it was long and tremulous and ragged and real, and when he looked up into Naruto’s eyes, there was a naked anguish and a fear and under it all a relief, and Naruto cupped the back of his neck and pulled him in and they laid back in the truck bed and cried in the cool, crisp smell of a Long Island autumn, cried all the way across the Verrazzano until the wind whipped his eyes dry, until the house on the inlet came into view.

 _Home_ , he said, or he thought, but Sasuke heard him, or read his mind, and they softened under each other’s hands and they knew it was finally over.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Still a lil behind. But I hope you’re enjoying reading it as much as I’m enjoying writing it. Few more to go now!


	10. Player Plays On

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Play on, player.

_ Eight Months Later _

Sasuke checked his hair in the rearview mirror, smoothing it down where it stuck up in the back. He just about managed to flatten it all when a warm, wide hand fluffed it back up again.

“You fucker,” he hissed, punching at Naruto’s shoulder.

“Looks better this way,” Naruto said, turning back to his bag of candy. “Not like he can see you anyways.”

That earned a short laugh before Sasuke regained himself. He cleared his throat, tugged on the collar of his t-shirt. 

“Want company?” Naruto said around a mouthful of twizzler. 

“I’m gonna solo this one,” Sasuke said. “Make sure we don’t get a ticket.”

“Kay.”

Naruto gripped his arm above the wrist, a quick, comforting press.

“Send my love, will ya?”

“Hm.”

It was balmy, even for June. Sasuke swiped at the sweat on the back of his neck and crossed the avenue, ambling toward the tall, open gate of the cemetery. 

He didn’t have flowers. He had in his shoulder bag a stick of incense, an apricot for his mom, a cigarette for his dad. He also had, on Naruto’s suggestion, a little ziploc bag of Shisui’s favorite hazelnut flavored protein powder. In his pants pocket, there was a blue raspberry lollipop.

The inside of the Uchiha mausoleum was fetid and hot and Sasuke imagined he heard the scurrying of little feet when he threw the door open. He took out the wilted bunches of lilies and white chrysanthemums left by the last visitors and put them in the little garbage bag he brought. He dusted off the remnants of ash. He lit the incense. He put out the apricot and the cigarette and the protein powder. 

He twirled the lollipop in his hands, then set it down on the marble shelf with the other things. 

“Hi."

He cleared his throat. 

"Iruka said it’s healthy for me to talk. About feelings. To use my words.”

He rubbed his eyes, suddenly shy, and just as annoyed as usual. 

“And you’re gone now. So I’m not sure what this is supposed to do for me, but Naruto said—” he glanced over at his mother’s name engraved on the polished black granite, “—I won’t tell you what he bribed me with. But I’m here.”

Sasuke sighed.

“And I feel…sad. I guess. And angry still. God, Itachi, I’m so fucking angry. At you. For dying. At the family for what they got you into. At myself, too. I don’t know.”

He scuffed his sneakers against the marble floor.

“And I…miss you. And I don’t know what to do with that. I think I’m going crazy sometimes, because I want to punch you still, I really do. But I want you here, too. I wish I knew you longer. Sometimes I feel like I didn’t really know you.”

“He didn’t make it easy, that’s for sure.”

Sasuke flinched. There, leaning on the open mausoleum door with a bouquet of white roses in his arms, was Kakashi.

“Yo.”

“Kakashi.”

He joined Sasuke in front of the marble shelf.

“Sorry to interrupt your meditation.”

“It’s fine,” Sasuke said, slipping his hands in his pockets. “This is fucking stupid anyway.” 

They stood in companionable silence for a long few moments. There was the hum of cicadas to welcome the evening and the bubbling coo of a mourning dove, and the distant sound of car horns from the street. Then Kakashi shifted to place the roses into one of the brass urns set into the shelf, closer to Obito's name. 

Sasuke caught a red glint off the long-slanting sunlight as Kakashi arranged the flowers: a familiar garnet and gold ring, sized to Itachi’s slim middle finger, sat snug on Kakashi’s pinky.

“How’s business?” Sasuke said.

“Oh, you know,” Kakashi said, flashing a cheery, sculpted smile. He shrugged with his injured shoulder, a stiff, slightly jerky motion. “Desk duty is a bore, but it’s better than going out on disability. Though the idea of fishing every day doesn't lack appeal...”

Sasuke looked the man over. Maybe it was his imagination, but a breeze picked up and slipped through the door, disturbing all the incense smoke. And in the breeze he heard Shisui's voice in his ear, a close whisper in the middle of a spar that said read underneath the underneath right before he knocked Sasuke out with a full-force kick to the jaw with an ankle Sasuke thought was sprained. 

He swept his left leg back and pulled the bowie knife tucked against his hip in one smooth, long motion. The blade sung off the nylon sheath as he swung it at Kakashi's throat. Kakashi spun with him, catching him by the wrist and a tight fistfull of hair, and he had Sasuke pinned painfully against the granite with the marble shelf in his gut before the knife clattered to the floor.

"Still playing games?" Kakashi said, voice dark and husky. "I thought you had enough of fighting."

Sasuke chuckled.

"You're a bastard, you know that? Naruto feels awful that they benched you. Thinks he ended your career. Least you can do is not pretend around us."

Kakashi eased off.

"Well, then…" he said, tone light. He shoved his hands in his pockets as Sasuke righted himself. "I suppose you're right."

Sasuke picked up his knife and slid it back into the sheath. He turned to the shelf and picked up the little offerings, then wiped off the incense ash with a corner of his t-shirt.

"Sasuke," Kakashi said, looking pointedly at his paint splattered shoes. "My replacement is eager to prove himself."

Sasuke smirked.

"We'll be careful."

They looked at each other for a long moment, a distant but clear acknowledgement, because Kakashi knew better than to touch Sasuke's shoulder, and he definitely knew better than to hug the young man like he would have hugged Naruto.

"Well. See you around, sarge."

Kakashi smiled, for real this time.

"Not if I see you first."

*

Gaara sat on the new couch in his new house in Albuquerque. The couch was firm, the brown leather smooth and unblemished, and the muted terracotta of the mostly empty walls made everything seem earthy and a little surreal. Temari had decorated the place with some old Navajo pattern rugs and blankets and bits of pottery they found in their father's old storage shed. The tones of brown and turquoise and coral pink all played nicely off the many cacti that had found their way inside the house. It was strange and a little uncomfortable, having the space and knowing they owned it, land and all. 

"Let's wrap up. I want us there in a half hour," Gaara said.

He counted out his spray caps, a few lime green boston fats and some bright yellow legos. The colors made him think of Naruto. 

"Temari, you got the roller pads?" Kankuro said from the kitchen.

Head half hidden in the hall closet, Temari growled.

"I can't fucking find them. I swear they were right here."

Shikamaru walked out from one of the bedrooms with a package of four fresh roller pads in his hand.

"They were behind the bucket paint in the master bedroom," he said, throwing the package at Kankuro. "This house is too big. Such a pain."

Temari slammed the hall closet door.

"This house was free, you ungrateful shit," she said, glaring. 

"I earned this house, you banshee," he said, squaring his jaw.

"Shut _ up  _ ," Gaara said, and even Kankuro flinched. "Get in the right headspace. I want efficiency. We're going until the paint's all gone."

Gaara watched Temari and Shikamaru stalk toward their bags and finish packing with jerky, frustrated snaps of their elbows.

"Their foreplay is the worst," Kankuro said, flopping down onto the couch next to him.

"It's bad," Gaara said, zipping up his backpack. "But it's nothing like Naruto and that guy's."

Kankuro grinned. His little brother was a lot of things, and none of them normal: fierce, distantly caring, maybe more than a little insane. Analytical to such a degree that sometimes the most basic social niceties seemed completely beyond him. Scary smart, and also just plain scary. But in that moment, with that wistful little frown, hair falling in his eyes as he bent over to tie his boots, he looked just like a regular teenager with a crush. 

"That guy, huh." Kankuro said, checking his watch. "They must be out already over on the east coast."

By the time Gaara sat back up again, the cool ferocity was back, and his green eyes were as blank as sea glass. 

"All right," he said, standing. "The autoracks should lay up at the north side of the yard."

He swept the room, eyeing Shikamaru and Temari and Kankuro in turn. 

"Are you ready?"

*

"Okay, like this, not too slow or it'll get all drippy."

Kiba turned with a satisfied grin to the wide, excited eyes of his shy little girlfriend.

"And I won't...I won't get arrested?" Hinata said, gingerly taking the spray can from him. It looked huge in her tiny hands.

"No way, baby, not with me lookin out."

Kiba stepped back and scanned the street. He picked a quiet alley, nothing anyone would really see, and that included cops. It wasn't a glory spot, but it was a good place to start. 

Hinata tested the can with a few short sprays into the air. Then she pursed her lips, widened her pigeon-toed stance, and took a deep breath in.

"Yeah. Good, baby, good."

Kiba stared. Then shook his head, and swept the perimeter again. He had to remind himself to keep his eyes up and off of Hinata's ass in those leggings as she stepped along the brick wall, sketching out her piece.

"Okay, good, now--holy shit."

She turned to him, a shy smile on her lips.

"That's. Christ. Have you been practicing with that blackbook I gave you?"

"Um. A little."

Kiba bit his cheek to keep from frowning. Her bars were all proportional, the piece had flow. There was a definite style there. It was way better than anything he ever did when he was a toy.

"Damn. All right. It's great. Let's just fix this transition from the CH to the I…"

*

"Well, shit. Look who came out on a school night."

Sakura socked Suigetsu in the arm, and he yelped.

"Classes have been out for a month, squid brain."

"Remind me why the fuck I have to be here again?" Karin said, eyes on her phone. 

"Because," Ino said, putting in her headphones. "This spot needs two lookouts. You take the corner on Broadway, and Suigetsu will watch from the roof across the way. It's green for go and red for hide. Okay?"

"Okay, okay," Suigetsu said, rubbing his arm. "Just don't let her punch me again."

"I'll start the four way call," Sakura said, sliding in her own headphones.

"And what if someone asks me why the fuck I'm standing on the corner of Broadway for an hour in the middle of the night?" Karin said, accepting the call with a tap of her manicured finger.

"You're a working girl, obviously," Suigetsu said, pinching her ass where it peeked out of the tiny shorts she wore. "Who's gonna look up at that rooftop when they could be looking at you."

"If someone tries to buy me, you're the one who's gonna pay," she said, shoving him away.

"Okay, bitch," Ino said, slipping her hand into Sakura's. "One more time for old time's sake?"

"One more time," Sakura said. "For daddy."

*

They stumbled up the stairs, giddy, tired, limbs buzzing with the last of the high. They were filthy, soaked with sweat and wrists dusted in a rainbow of overspray in a bright band between the end of the gloves and the rolled-up hems of their sleeves. Naruto had a red line cutting through his whisker marks where the respirator bit into his skin, and Sasuke's bangs were tipped white and stiff with paint. 

They stripped their shirts off and kicked off their sneakers and dropped their bags in the living room with a loud clank and rattle of many empty cans. Sasuke moved toward the bedroom, hands on the button of his jeans.

"Hey," Naruto said, his fingers sliding between Sasuke's as he pressed close from behind. "Let me."

Sasuke leaned back against Naruto's chest, and through the slick of sweat the heat of Naruto's body was like a brand. He watched the tan fingers undo the button then the zipper with a hazy intent. Then he felt the soft press of calloused fingers slipping into the waistband of his boxers, and a second wave of energy bubbled up from the base of his spine. He twisted back around and shoved Naruto against the wall before those strong, tawny hands could push his pants down any farther.

"Me first," he said, tugging roughly at Naruto's joggers. 

"I can't--I can't believe we pulled that off," Naruto said, breathless, as his head fell back against the wall. "You were so--shit, Sas'ke, go slow--mm, you were. You were so."

Sasuke looked up from where he knelt on the floor and quirked a slim brow.

"I was so?"

Naruto ran his hands through Sasuke's hair, gripping gently at the shorter strands in the back. His eyes were heavy and dark, just a ring of crystal blue around the wide pupils. 

"What was I saying?" 

"You're a moron."

Naruto groaned, fingers twitching as Sasuke's paint-stiff bangs brushed the bare skin of his belly again. 

The soft blue light of morning peeked in through the wide windows of their spacious studio apartment. It washed the sparse, industrial furnishings with a warm glow and played over their shoulders as they burned the very last of their energy, pouring one into the other until they were both full and empty and sated and spent, a tangle of limbs on the big bed.

"Sas'ke," Naruto said, nuzzling into Sasuke's belly.

Sasuke cracked one bleary eye open to glare down at him.

"Don't say it."

"Gotta. Gotta say it."

Sasuke sighed, slipping his fingers deep into the soft blonde hair.

"Fine. Go on."

Naruto scooted up on one elbow, looking fucked-out and flushed and wearing just the stupidest, softest smile.

"I love you. Asshole."

Sasuke schooled his features, but his lips quirked up at the edges, and if his face went a little pinker than normal, he chalked it up to exertion.

"Go to sleep, moron."

He gripped the back of Naruto's neck and pulled him back down again. They tucked in, and Sasuke spared himself a contented sigh.

Then, quietly, as an afterthought:

"I'm not gonna say it."

He felt more than heard Naruto laugh against his collar bone.

"I know, asshole. I can tell anyways."

Sasuke curled into him, reflecting on how strange-prickly-soothing-uncomfortable-warm-angry-hot he found it that Naruto could peek into his head and actually like what was inside. For the first time in a long time, he fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

*

Naruto woke some hours later to a muffled buzzing, face buried in the warm, hard plane of Sasuke's side. 

"Ignore it," Sasuke rasped.

Naruto rolled over, slapping around at the floor near the bed until he found the leg of his pants. He fished his phone out and held it to his ear.

"Shika?"

_ "Turn on channel 5. You're gonna want to see this. " _

Naruto stumbled up, cradling the phone between his ear and shoulder as he tugged on his boxers. 

"Kay. This better be good."

_ "It's good. Believe it. " _

Naruto rolled his eyes and ended the call. He padded over to the little entertainment center they used for games and clicked through the inputs till he landed on cable.

A prim anchor was seated at a news desk in front of a screen that flashed, one after the other after the other, photos of the same familiar name.

_ " ...which authorities are calling an organized act of mass vandalism. The pieces, which showed up this morning in four major cities across the country and on three Canadian-Pacific railroad cars, appear to be a nod to philanthropist and former FBI agent Itachi Uchiha… _ "

Naruto stretched and yawned. He emptied the old grounds from the percolator and rinsed the pot. He was pouring in some fresh coffee when he felt arms snake around his waist.

"Your hands are freezing. It's summer, how is that even possible."

"You put the AC on sixty-nine because you're a walking furnace," Sasuke grumbled against his shoulder.

"I put the AC on sixty-nine because it's funny," Naruto said, twisting until they were face to face. "And cause we can afford it now."

Sasuke scowled, muttering 'idiot' as he reached around Naruto to flick the percolator on. 

"Y'know," Naruto said, brushing a lock of hair behind his ear. "You're gonna have to learn to be a morning person if you wanna go to FBI school or whatever."

Sasuke cocked his head, taking in the steely focus under the soft affection in Naruto's blue, blue eyes.

"You'd really move to Quantico?"

The anchor chirped on in the background:

_ " ...One of the many charitable organizations headed by the late Uchiha was a New York City-based charity called Helping Handstyles, which did outreach with vulnerable youth involved in graffiti vandalism…" _

Naruto shrugged, folding his thick arms.

"Lots of freight in Virginia. Easy to get to DC and Baltimore and Richmond. Not too far from Nola and Atlanta. I mean, there's worst places we could be."

Sasuke smiled, a small thing, full of hope. It was an unfamiliar configuration of muscles, strange but not unpleasant.

_ "...Uchiha died of cancer related to exposure to aerosol paints late this winter. His legacy lives on in the recently expanded cancer wing at NYU-Langone research center, and in the hearts and the cities of the unidentified suspects who painted his name …" _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Man so that's it! What a wild ride this was for me. Thanks for your patience and for reading through, even when I was late a day (or two!).
> 
> It was so much fun trying to put together a new world with these characters. I was really motivated by the idea that I could see how they move through a more integrated and familiar (to me) landscape. My headcanon for this is kind of nuts. Latino Gaara! Black Shino! Mixed-race Shikamaru! Hot white Beverly Hills Barbie Ino! The Uchiha are Japanese, but Shisui is maybe also half a guido. Maybe Iruka is a nice Jewish doctor. Vaguely white-trash Naruto, which is a trope I believe I’ve read a fair amount of times in this fandom. 
> 
> I really hope you enjoyed. I have a feeling I may write more into this 'world' in the future (would you read that?), but for now I'm working on another long fic for another fandom as well as a long-form fic in the actual Narutoverse. So it may be a second.
> 
> Anyway thanks again for reading, I love fandom and I love this fandom in particular. I came late to Naruto after abandoning it as a kid, and since stepping back in, I’ve been bowled over by the series and all the amazing fanworks available here and elsewhere. You are all amazing and I’m super grateful you exist.


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